Subject: "The Future of Interactive Television is Internet Webcasting"

From: "Lawrence A. Rowe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 11:35:45 -0800

Hi -

I gave a talk on monday at the U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign that
folks on this list might be interested in seeing.  I've included the
title and abstract below with a link to the archive that you can replay
(Windows Media Player).

Comments appreciated.
	Larry
-- 
Professor Lawrence A. Rowe          Internet:  [email-masked]
Computer Science Division - EECS       Phone: 510-642-5117
University of California, Berkeley       Fax: 510-642-5615
Berkeley, CA 94720-1776            URL: http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/~larry

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"The Future of Interactive Television is Internet Webcasting"
(archived at http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/dls/rowe/rowe.html)

Lawrence A. Rowe
Computer Science Division - EECS
University of California at Berkeley

Traditional broadcast television programs are composed of one video 
stream with no interaction, fixed image size, and constrained picture
quality. The development of media distribution networks such as 
Broadcast.com and Real Broadcast Networks and single-source multicast 
protocols suggests that Internet Webcasting will be yet another 
distribution channel for television programming with the same 
constraints imposed by current television distribution technologies 
(e.g., wireless, satellite, and cable).

Internet Webcasting, on the other hand, can support multiple video
streams, interaction between participants, and variable quality
streams.  In spite of these technical capabilities, most webcasts today
are produced using traditional television technologies and are 
constrained to the limitations imposed by that technology.

This talk describes research on developing computer-based webcasting 
technology that exploits capabilities of this new medium including
broadcast management, video-effects processing, and live production
control. The principle application is distance/asynchronous learning,
but the technology applies to many more applications including
distributed collaboration and entertainment.