A digital on-demand video service supporting content-based queries

Video-on-demand represents a key demonstrative application for enabling multimedia technology in communication, database, and interface research. This application requires solving a number of diverse technical problems including the data synchronization problem for time-dependent data delivery. In this paper we describe the general requirements of video-on-demand and introduce a system supporting content-based retrieval and playback for the structure and content of digital motion pictures. In our model we capture domain-specific information for motion pictures and provide access to individual scenes of movies through queries on a temporal database. We describe our implementation of this service using existing workstation and storage technology.