AbSTrAcT In this chapter we consider from a marketing perspective the political, cultural/social, and economic factors, both micro and macro, affecting the supply/demand nexus of broadband services for the Irish consumer. We chart the development of broadband and its current situation of rollout and uptake, examine the reasons for its continuing poor performance, and offer recommendations on ho...

As distributed multimedia applications are starting to be offered as services in enterprise and residential cable networks, there is a growing interest in platforms that provide a standard framework for the development and deployment of these applications. Key issues in platform design are service diversity, service portability and interoperability of user terminal equipment. We propose a platf...

Background: The perquisite of an effective nutritional intervention is a proper educational method. The aim of this study was to define the effectiveness of nutritional education using discussion group and multimedia on learning of pregnant women. Method: This randomized educational trial was conducted among 174 pregnant women in northeastern Iran, Gonabad city. Participants were assigned rand...

This paper describes an architectural framework for the development of Internet-based multimedia systems such as interactive and collaborative media on-demand applications. The programming in-the-small level centres on Java and a variant of the Actor model especially designed for time-dependent distributed systems. The programming in-the-large level can be tuned to exploit current real-time and...

The increased number of mobile and stationary devices with multimedia capabilities enables new application scenarios. Particularly interesting is collaborative multimedia access, where a number of users simultaneously enjoys the same content – possibly at different locations using different devices. In this paper we focus on middleware support for such application scenarios. In particular our a...

This paper describes an architectural framework for the development of Internet-based multimedia systems such as interactive and collaborative media on-demand applications. The programming in-the-small level centres on Java and a variant of the Actor model especially designed for time-dependent distributed systems. The programming in-the-large level can be tuned to exploit current real-time and...

An analysis of how visual modeling of structure and dynamic behavior of a multimedia application differs from modeling conventional software yields that aspects of the graphical user interface and time-dynamic behavior ought to be integral parts of a coherent multimedia application model. In this sense, we extend the model-view-controller paradigm towards multimedia. As a result, we present OMM...

Multimedia streaming technology evolves in accordance with the growing needs of networked end-users for flexible and effective media delivery. The applicability of streaming media is further enhanced by the rapid evolution of the Internet. Our purpose is: (i) to review multimedia streaming technology with respect to the variety of multimedia applications, (ii) to assess the underlying Quality o...

The multimedia multiuser applications such as computer supported cooperative working and desk-top multimedia conferencing are composed of multiple individually-controlled service elements which require complex communication services from underlying communication systems. In this paper, we present an end system software architecture to support multi-media multiuser applications in high-speed net...