An Object-Oriented DataBase for Movies-on-Demand: Two Approaches

Interactive multimedia technology has seen a great deal of recent attention since it will allow its users with the flexibility of selecting and receiving specific information; many telecommunication industries and research groups are thus employing a lot of their resources to study the feasibility of new video services, nowadays known as Video on Demand (VoD). Among these services, T-VoD (True-VOD) services for movie on demand require the use of a bi-directional signal so that the user should be able to play a film with full (virtual) VCR capabilities. In a typical T-VOD system there should be some content archives connected via an high-speed network to many local (regional) distribution sites; this data distribution increases availability and reliability, and is easier to manage since each local system is responsible for its own billing and accounting. Concerning with the DataBase Management Systems (DBMSs), the research is oriented on Object-Oriented DBMS (OODBMS). In this paper we briefly discuss the organization of video-data on the regional server by describing the work performed to implement an application to manage digital movies; our application is based on the ObjectStore OODBMS.