Multimedia customisation using an event notification protocol

Online personalisation is of great interest to companies. Event notification systems are becoming more and more popular as a natural candidate to provide personalised services. Although event notification protocols do not immediately spring to mind as the most sensible transport of realtime streams, our approach does utilise a content-based event notification protocol. In this paper we present an architecture able to correlate and filter real-time multimedia streams using an event notification protocol (Elvin) and the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP). We demonstrate, through simple examples, how a MPEG-2 stream can be customised to the user in real-time based on his or her subscription. Such an architecture can serve as enabling technology to integrate, correlate and abstract different sources of information such as discrete and continuous events.