Rich Media from the Masses

By putting the tools for media creation in the hands of the consumer, there will be exponential growth in the distribution and hosting of media on the Internet. We expect this growth to parallel that of HTTP traffic. Our position is that we need to confront the issues related to the potential exponential growth in the number of media sources and services. Further, we believe that significantly higher quality streaming and context-sensitive personalization of multimedia services are key enablers of this whole technology area. Our vision differs from the delivery of video-on-demand services because we believe that there will be a vast number of sources of copyleft content. In this paper we focus on four key areas: the distributed discovery of content; the concurrent manipulation of multiple media streams; media sensitive mechanisms for providing end-to-end services over the Internet; and the subjective assessment of delivered media quality.