Prospects for Interactive Video - on - Demand 1

–Interactive multimedia systems represent a key technology rapidly evolving from marketing hype and research prototypes to commercial deployments. Supporting truly interactive multimedia services requires providing personalized, dedicated channels or sessions for each user. For these services, the user has complete control over the session and has the freedom to explore the depth of both live and stored programming as maintained by future information providers. Development of these interactive multimedia services requires solving a diverse set of technical problems, many of which are tractable in isolation; however, the integration of these many technologies to achieve an end-to-end solution has proven to be a significant obstacle to ubiquitous service. This paper presents a survey of the technological considerations for the design of a large scale distributed interactive multimedia system. The paper identifies the core problems and examines approaches proposed and implemented for their solution.