The benchmarking of various methods of video analysis and indexing has become a research problem per se. The Argos evaluation campaign supported by the French Techno-Vision program aimed at developing resources for a benchmarking of video content analysis and indexing methods. The paper describes the type of the evaluated tasks, the way the content set has been produced, metrics and tools developed for the evaluations and some of the results obtained at the end of the first phase. Perspectives based on current works will be given to conclude this paper.