Retrospective of the Distributed Media Server Technology

Abstract

The last five years the Web as a media server environment is moving quickly beyond static text and images, and even beyond mono-streaming and simple “push” as new generations of media are emerging and delivery the teleimmersion on the grid distributed systems. The media servers use the term webcasting, which includes intelligent push services and multi-streaming audio and video.

This article introduces the early generation of Virtual Reality Webcasting (VRW) by defining new media models while also identifying the new media architecture being developed to support these new, more complex forms of online multimedia and the new concept of teleimmersion technologies in the grid systems.

This retrospective article, describes and presents ideas in Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) technology that are mostly focused on integrating the VRML with other technologies applied in Internet services (e.g. data streaming and push techniques, multicasting and multimedia). The Virtual Reality Webcasting technology is announced as a new web communication paradigm. Our example is a project involving a Virtual Reality Webcasting of the University Sailing Regatta, the first attempt at a real-time VR webcast of such an event in 1997. Furthermore we explore the great development of streaming multimedia and its implication for future grid systems, as the ultimate synthesis of media and networking technologies.