Experiences of developing distributed multimedia business applications

Interest in multimedia applications has risen dramatically of late, in large measure due to significant advances in key enabling technologies and the rapid convergence of telephone, cable TV, and entertainment conglomerates. While the mass-media has focused very tightly on the impact of these developments on the home entertainment industry, it seems that, somewhere lost in the shuffle, has been a broad class of services centered on multimedia business communications. Based on a strong belief that such services can significantly improve company communications at many levels, we have been targeting our research to explore potential applications and enabling technologies relevant to this market segment. The paper presents a broad discussion of first-hand experiences of developing distributed multimedia applications. The authors describe several of the business-oriented applications they have constructed and some of the tools and techniques developed to assist in the process. They also discuss some of their latest experiences with high-speed networking technology (specifically ATM) for supporting distributed multimedia applications