Integrating distributed multimedia systems and interactive television networks

Recent advances in networks, storage and video delivery systems are about to make commercial deployment of interactive multimedia services over digital television networks a reality. The emerging components individually have the potential to satisfy the technical requirements in the near future. However, no single vendor is offering a complete end-to-end commercially-deployable and scalable interactive multimedia applications systems over digital/analog television systems. Integrating a large set of maturing sub-assemblies and interactive multimedia applications is a major task in deploying such systems. Here we deal with integration issues, requirements and trade-offs in building delivery platforms and applications for interactive television services. Such integration efforts must overcome lack of standards, and deal with unpredictable development cycles and quality problems of leading-edge technology. There are also the conflicting goals of optimizing systems for video delivery while enabling highly interactive distributed applications. It is becoming possible to deliver continuous video streams from specific sources, but it is difficult and expensive to provide the ability to rapidly switch among multiple sources of video and data. Finally, there is the ever-present challenge of integrating and deploying expensive systems whose scalability and extensibility is limited, while ensuring some resiliency in the face of inevitable changes. This proceedings version of the paper is an extended abstract.