Previous | Table of Contents | Next |
T. M. Rajkumar and Amitava Haldar
Despite the ready availability of multimedia applications, most organizations have been unable to meet the requirements for effectively and efficiently distributing multimedia information. By reviewing the business issues involved in the design of multimedia networks and implementation of multimedia applications, this chapter prepares managers to deliver multimedia applications over the corporate network while providing for guaranteed quality of service.
As a highly effective method of communication that simultaneously provides several forms of information to the user audio, graphics and animation, full-motion video, still images, and text multimedia offers a departure from the communication confines present in other singular-media applications. Advances in multimedia technology and widespread acceptance of the technology in the business community are driving the need to effectively and efficiently distribute multimedia applications.
Users today have easy and inexpensive access to multimedia-capable equipment. The explosive growth of the CD-rom applications such as multi-media databases, and the World Wide Web indicate the ease with which multimedia applications proliferate in an organization. Despite this ready availability, however, most multimedia applications are currently not distributed and work on single desktop computers. Most organizations have been unable both to keep up with the requirements to distribute multi-media information and to realize the goal of network computing to build an infrastructure that supports a cooperative enterprise environment. This chapter identifies common multimedia applications and business considerations in effective distribution of multimedia information.
The primary function of multimedia in most applications is as an interface; it allows an unhindered and manageable flow of information to the user that is consistent yet flexible in design and enables the user to accommodate varied work flows. Multimedia must therefore not be a barrier to information transfer; it must be conducive to it.
The following several technology advances have improved multimedias ability to effectively transfer information and are driving the development of multimedia applications:
The most important business driver of multimedia applications is teleconferencing, which saves organizations travel costs by enabling geographically dispersed individuals and groups to communicate in real-time. Multimedia applications development is also driven by the need to access information on the World Wide Web, demand for information and training systems, improved customer services such as advertising and public advice systems, and improved enterprise effectiveness such as correspondence management.
For the purposes of this chapter, the applications of networked multimedia are divided into two categories:1
In addition, networked applications are also classified on the basis of time; they are either immediate or deferred. Immediate applications, in which a user interacts with another person or computer in real-time, must meet latency or delay requirements. Deferred applications imply that the user is interacting with the other user or server in a manner that does not have latency or delay requirements. Messaging applications such as E-mail and voice mail are people-to-people applications in the deferred category.
Immediate | Deferred | |
---|---|---|
People-to-people | Telephony,Multimedia Conferencing | E-mail, Voice Mail |
People-to-Information Server | WWW Browsing, Video-on-Demand | File Transfer |
A useful test for determining whether an application is immediate or deferred is whether the user is only working on the one application (which would make the application immediate) or can move to other applications during its use (making the application deferred). Exhibit 1 depicts the categories of networked multimedia applications.
The following sections examine multimedia applications and their networking requirements. The focus is on immediate applications, because they place greater demands on the network system than do deferred applications.
Video-on-demand applications let users request a video from a remote server. In a business setting, this approach is applicable for downloading training videos and viewing them on the desktop. If the videos are stored on a server, video-on-demand can be used for just-in-time training.
Because the disk requirements to download and store a video (before presentation) are expensive, video-on-demand has strict real-time requirements on transmissions but tolerates an initial delay in the playback of the data.2 Transmission guarantees require that the bandwidth be available for the entire duration of the video. The delay requirements are not stringent, because some data can be buffered at the receiving end.
The World Wide Web is a system that allows clients to retrieve and browse through hypertext/hypermedia documents stored on remote servers. Currently most material on the Web is text- or graphic-based; the data storage and transmission requirements associated with audio and video allow only a few users to add these features. Video access is also awkward because the video player that supports the video format (i.e., software plug-in) must exist on the client.
Many businesses, however, use the Web to provide organizational information and to support access to databases (mostly internal to the company). The Web creates different challenges for business organizations, which must conduct comprehensive capacity planning (i.e., of bandwidth, types of applications, and security) before roll out. It is bandwidth and the number of simultaneous users accessing the service that play a critical role in Web site management. Applications providing multimedia data require greater bandwidth that supports transmission-delay requirements.
Two common people-to-people applications are multimedia conferencing and groupware.
Multimedia conferencing is used by many businesses to support the collaborative efforts of growing numbers of virtual groups and organizational teams. The benefits of multimedia conferencing include:
Previous | Table of Contents | Next |