030.60.2 Multimedia by Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
What's multimedia? For me, "Multimedia" is an adjective; it implies only that human-sensible information is being transmitted (the "media") via the use of more than simple text (the "multi"). That it crosses application areas engenders confusion among those who try to bound the set of multimedia applications.
Much of the current growth of multimedia computing is a byproduct of changes in consumer electronics. The transition of ordinary consumer and office information devices and services (telephones, copiers, cameras, television) from analog to digital is happening because those devices can be made with better quality, features, and lower cost. These developments shaped the technologies available for multimedia computing today, in support of audio, document imaging, color and video.
In particular, interest in multimedia computing is fueled by the availability of low-cost hardware for aquisition, compression, decompression and reproduction of page images (with scanners, binary image compression using "Group 4" compression, and page-size displays or image-capable printers), color (slide scanners, video frame grabbers, and electronic cameras; JPEG compression, and color displays and printers), sound (these days, most workstations and PCs either have built-in sound capabilties or low-cost add-on boards are available), and full-motion video.
The activities in networking and communication center in two areas: real-time or interactive communication in multimedia applications, and transmission, storage and retrieval of static multimedia documents; call these "telnet" and "ftp".
For the "telnet" applications, the goal is to develop the underlying infrastructure to support communication with real-time requirements.
At the transport layer, the conflicts between the telecommunications and packet-network views of communications seem to be resolving in the ATM standardization community. For more conventional internet activities, we'll watch the development of extensions to X and other windowing protocols for dealing with multimedia data, communication protocols for not-quite-real-time network video and the like.
For "ftp" applications, the focus is on is standardizing the interchange formats and transmission mechanisms for multimedia documents across the network.
Thus, the IETF NetFax group is pushing ahead with a profile for TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) format as the standard for page images (fax or scanned), while the Internet Extensions Task Force has been laying the groundwork for describing and encoding mail containing audio, image or formatted text, possibly in multiple parts.
In other areas, we'll watch for development of interchange standards for particular kinds of multimedia applications; for example, "MHEG" (the Multimedia and Hypermedia Experts Group) is developing an interchange standards for "synchronized multimedia and time dependent hypermedia structures", scheduled to reach initial draft stage some time in 1993. Another group is working on an international standard for AudioVisual Interactive 'scriptware' (AVI).
