NMIS Project Final Report 1993 - 1997
3.0 Technology and Support
Introduction
The effectiveness of high performance computing for
education, commerce, and information dissemination hinges upon the ability to
deliver multimedia content. However, the problem of distributing multimedia
content, especially video, over a network as large and as heterogeneous as the
Internet is a difficult one. New paradigms from information production,
through presentation to delivery will be required to produce effective services
for a more robust network infrastructure.
Accomplishments
The NMIS Project has developed technologies and support for production and
delivery of multimedia prototype services via the National Information
Infrastructure (NII). Rather than develop tools and then find applications,
these initiatives identified services and then developed the appropriate
technologies for supporting network delivery of multimedia services using live,
on demand, subscription and interactive delivery models.
The specific activities of the Technology and Support component of the NMIS
Project include:
- Equipment, software and services provided by industry were used to construct
and staff the Network Services Operations Center (NSOC) at MIT in Cambridge, MA
to support the production and delivery of NMIS projects.
- MIT/CAES experimented with real time multimedia delivery and multicast
transmission of content on the Internet by broadcasting CAES seminars via the
MBONE and broadcast MBONE traffic over the MIT cable network.
- The NMIS Project Team at MIT, in cooperation with Turner Educational
Services, Inc. (TESI), has successfully supported the long term implementation
of a World Wide Web (WWW) accessible INTERNET CNN Newsroom Daily Multimedia
Magazine and Video Library.
- MIT/CAES and Dartmouth/IML each developed ScriptX-based authoring
environments for creating interactive multimedia services and then used the
resulting tool kits to produce and deliver prototype LAN based interactive
multimedia services deliverable via the WWW.
- The NMIS project supported the evaluation of scaleable distribution
architectures to accommodate multimedia on the National Information
Infrastructure (NII). The key technical objective of this effort was
understanding local access alternatives, as well as distributed multimedia
server and storage usage in high bandwidth network environments. These
activities produced an integrated economic model for video on demand and video
dialtone systems.
While specific implementations have been rendered obsolete, the principles of
their operation were on target and in some cases influenced technologies that
were later more broadly adopted. For example, NMIS team members developed
Hierarchical Media Distribution (Caching) and Live Media Display (Streaming) to
reduce the problems of the time required to download a file to local disk and
the amount of local storage required to buffer the video before playback. While
these specific implementations were not widely adopted, they embodied critical
capabilities which have since gained significant recognition. The NMIS Project
also evaluated potential improved architectures to accommodate the use of
multimedia on the National Information Infrastructure (NII).