News on-demand for multimedia networks

Abstract

A publisher of business and financial news and a regional telephone service provider are developing the means to produce, distribute, and retrieve multimedia news over wideband information networks. The goal is to deliver business news ondemand to corporate and financial services professionals in nearreal-time using advanced network-based multimedia services. The new requirements of this application led to the creation of the following prototypes: a multimedia news programming format for live and stored information; a system concept for network-based multimedia information services; a flexible information structure to support composition, linkage, reuse, indexing, versioning, access control, and presentation control for live and stored multimedia; a groupware authoring system for audio-video capture, editing, indexing, and publishing; a digital information network with dynamically allocated stream and packet channels; a network-based multimedia store-and-forward service to provide notification, controlled distribution, access via authorizations, and database search and retrieval; a multimedia local area distribution system; and a user interface for browsing, search, notification and retrieval, with automatic hyper-linking to associated information and non-linear view/playback of audio-video material. The prototypes make efficient use of available multimedia and communications technologies, and are intended to exploit future network and media products as they become available. The resulting system serves as a high-performance testbed to study user requirements, to evaluate new technologies, to probe market needs, and to develop new multimedia service concepts. While the current work focuses on a specific application, it is expected to provide a model for developing a wide range of multimedia applications and services.