The Influence of Network Quality of Service Factors on the Usability and Effectiveness of Multimedia Internet Broadcasting

While many businesses are keen to develop multimedia internet broadcasting for in-house services, their deployment raises important practical issues, both for user departments and for corporate network managers. These range from fitness for purpose and usability on the one hand, to the implications for network infrastructure on the other. The study we outline in this paper was motivated by the need to address these issues. We describe an experimental evaluation of a multimedia internet broadcasting service designed to support staff training within a large UK bank. The focus of our investigation is the influence of different kinds of media content and of network quality of service upon subjects’ memory for, and comprehension of, information. In particular, our findings are that degraded quality of service has a greater influence on subjects’ uptake of emotive/affective content than on their uptake of factual content. In general, we found that subjects rated the usability of the system to be quite low, even under ideal network conditions. The results have implications for the more general application of multimedia internet broadcasting.