The advent of multimedia databases and the popularity of digital video as an archival medium poses many technical challenges and has profound implications for the underlying model of information access. We have incorporated an extensive set of multimedia processing engines in a project that we have developed for the Greek National Council for Radio and Television (NCRTV), with the hope and intention that it will become a powerful tool: (a) in automatically creating metadata for indexing and news broadcasts in a large internal multimedia archive, (b) in gaining full strategic value from the inherent value of media assets and (c) in supporting users within the Council in their analysis and research tasks. Video content processing involves automatic speech recognition, speaker identification, speech synthesis and video text detection. Moreover, expert users manually produce video metadata of different sorts, such as transcriptions, summaries, named entity and term indexes, etc. Users can query, manually or automatically, annotated news stories with the help of an ergonomic integrated environment for media annotation. In this project, universities and private companies have worked together to achieve this goal under a unified framework, to provide coordinated e-government solutions and to deliver an integrated service. PANOPTIS combines speech and language processing, multimedia retrieval and a fully functional video annotation environment that assists the users in organizing and characterizing news stories and current affairs. We have worked on automatic speech recognition, video segmentation and key-frame extraction, media analysis applications and we have developed the general computational framework (we call it QualiArc) that underlies the whole system.