CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
World Wide Web Consortium
Workshop
"Real Time Multimedia and the Web"
(RTMW '96)
October 24-25, 1996
INRIA-Sophia Antipolis - France
POSITION PAPER
Our job, in support of the Italian telecom operator (TELECOM ITALIA),
is mainly aimed at testing and evaluating real-time applications over the
Internet; TELECOM ITALIA offers both low and medium bandwidth access to
the Internet (commercial) and high bandwidth backbone networks=
(experimental).
The typical real-time applications we consider are video-conference=
applications
and audio/video streaming with a particular reference to their=
implementation
on PC/Windows platform; we realize that the distribution of audio and video
integrated with the Web is gaining quick and large success.
In our experience some main outstanding issues are:
- lack of interoperability among products from different manufacturers,
which means several coexistent insulated operating environments, or full
dependence from a manufacturer; A standard application protocol (RTP) would
be of great benefit, but a standard encoding should be considered too.
- unsatisfactory quality of the perceived audio and video quality, even
if the throughput capabilities of the network are high. This could depend
both on the lack of products for PCs explicitly designed for high bandwidth
networks (it is the case of most audio players, designed for modem access
to the Internet) or on the performances of the actual CPUs (SW decoders
vs. HW decoders)
- need for a better QoS from the network; a best effort performance may
be inadequate for good quality real-time applications both in terms of
bandwidth and of latency
- need for a better integration of multimedia players within the web
browser (plug-in applications, helper applications, HTML extensions, ...)
- need for a better integration between the Web servers and the=
audio/video
servers.
We are confident that the forthcoming workshop will give a good chance
to establish a common view among the participants; that=92s why we are very
interested in participating.
We apology for submitting this application a bit late after the deadline
of September 6 and hope you can still accept it.
Last modified September 9, 1996.