PANORAMA aims at development of a system for efficient search and mining of audiovisual data from large distributed multimedia databases through several types of networks (Internet, intranets, etc.). The main objectives of the project are the interoperability of databases and the availability of software products and services on networks for open multimedia access. Digitalization of archives assets should provide all possible information (video, images, sound, texts, etc.) for wide public and professional use. Main subjects for implementation are the content-based retrieval from multimedia databases as well as search and extraction of characteristic scenes from video data for insertion in synthetic environments. Definition of audiovisual objects should be adopted within the framework of MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards in order to focus the project on the application of emerging technologies. Intellectual property rights and copyrights, preservation and security of the information are points that focusing specific attention by using innovative methods for protection such as watermarking for video data authentication and several encryption techniques.