Keeranoor G. Kumar

The HotMedia architecture: progressive and interactive rich media for the Internet

HotMedia is a novel scalable solution for delivering interactive rich media over the Internet. It is a delivery-suitable file format that can contain heterogeneous compositions of media bit streams as well as meta-data that define the behavior, composition, and interaction semantics. This enables the creation of lightweight single-file representations of interactive, multiphase presentations involving multiple media-type content. The HotMedia client has a smart content algorithm that infers types from the incoming data stream and fetches the media renderer components, user-interface components, and hyper-linked action components, all just-in-time, resulting in progressive and contest driven enrichment of the user experience. Internet users get a simple initial experience with minimal latency followed by enrichment of this experience. HotMedia has an open and extensible architecture, which enables and encourages the inclusion of new media-types, user-interfaces, and hyper-linked actions. By separating media-rendering from action-performing, it lets all media handle the same actions. HotMedia can also track on the server-side, user interactions and user-experience associated parameters. In its simplest usage HotMedia requires no more than a regular web server for delivery and no client-side preinstallation.

Bamba: audio and video streaming over the internet

The World Wide Web has become a primary means of disseminating information, which is being presented increasingly through multiple media. The ability to broadcast audio and video information is becoming a reality with the advent of new media-streaming technologies. Most of the emerging streaming systems require high-bandwidth connections in order to deliver audio and video of suitable quality. In this paper we present a media-streaming system, called Bamba, that delivers audio and video over low-bandwidth modem connections with the use of standard compression technologies. Bamba offers high-quality audio and video over low-bit-rate connections and can operate using a standard HTTP server. The Bamba video is enhanced with special provisions for reducing the effect of errors in a Iossy-network environment. Bamba adheres to existing standards wherever possible. Finally, Bamba has been fully implemented and deployed both internally at IBM and externally.