This report addresses issues related to delivering products and services over broadband, including the technical and business challenges of providing multimedia entertainment, video and other services on demand, interactive television, the wireless Web, videoconferencing, telemedicine, and more. The report also considers the current and potential markets for such applications, the business models providers that can adopt, and pricing and fee structures, while focusing on those applications and on the business models that will make them available and profitable.

Here is a thorough, not-overly-complex introduction to the three technical foundations for multimedia applications across the Internet: communications (principles, technologies and networking); compressive encoding of digital media; and Internet protocol and services. All the contributing systems elements are explained through descriptive text and numerous illustrative figures; the result is a book well-suited toward non-specialists, preferably with technical background, who need well-composed tutorial introductions to the three foundation areas. The text discusses the latest advances in digital audio and video encoding, optical and wireless communications technologies, high-speed access networks, and IP-based media streaming, all crucial enablers of the multimedia Internet.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunication Services, IDMS'98, held in Oslo, Norway, in September 1998. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 68 submissions. Also included are seven position statements. The book is divided into topical sections on distributed multimedia applications; platforms for collaborative systems; MPEG; coding for WWW, wireless, and mobile environments; QoS and user aspects; flow control, congestion control, and multimedia streams; multimedia servers, documents, and authoring; and storage servers.

Consumers want it, businesses are demanding it. The migration of Internet services to a mobile environment is inevitable. But while the ability to be on the go and connected to the Internet sets the stage for increased efficiency and productivity, many technical challenges associated with user mobility and wireless connectivity remain. Mobil

This book is primarily a summary of research done over 10 years in multimedia and virtual reality, which fits within a wider interest of exploiting psychological theory to improve the process of designing interactive systems. The subject matter lies firmly within the field of HCI, with some cross-referencing to software engineering. Extending Sutcliffe's views on the design process to more complex interfaces that have evolved in recent years, this book: *introduces the background to multisensory user interfaces and surveys the design issues and previous HCI research in these areas; *explains the basic psychology for design of multisensory user interfaces, including the Interactive Cognitive Subsystems cognitive model; *describes elaborations of Norman's models of action for multimedia and VR, relates these models to the ICS cognitive model, and explains how the models can be applied to predict the design features necessary for successful interaction; *provides a design process from requirements, user and domain analysis, to design of representation in media or virtual worlds and facilities for user interaction therein; *covers usability evaluation for multisensory interfaces by extending existing well-known HCI approaches of heuristic evaluation and observational usability testing; and *presents two special application areas for multisensory interfaces: educational applications and virtual prototyping for design refinement.

In recent years we have witnessed the explosion of multimedia traffic on the Internet. The availability of high bandwidth connections together with the recent advances in high quality video and audio compression techniques have created a fertile ground for the growth of multimedia applications such as interactive video on demand, collaborative distance learning, and remote medical diagnosis. Furthermore, the availability of low bit rate video and audio applications (e.g., H.263 and G.728) and the proliferation of pervasive devices create a new demand for wireless multimedia communication systems. After a decade or more of research and development in multimedia networking, the research community has learned a number of lessons. First, increasing the capacity of the “best effort” networks and services does not provide an effective and permanent solution for offering a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). Second, the integration of service and network management is a key element in providing end to end service management. Third, management techniques for Internet multimedia services must be scalable and adaptive to guarantee QoS and maintain fairness with optimal network resource.