The distributed Media Bank

The paper presents a design for a “Media Bank” that is a generalization of a video server. The bank is a distributed, evolutionary storage environment for audiovisual material accessed both sequentially and interactively. The idea is that information contained within it evolves both through use and through the analytical contributions of users. Every client is also a contributor to the bank. The design is deliberately independent of both network protocols and graphical scripting languages. The research focus is on the dynamic assembly of audiovisual material from primitive elements, on-the-fly, on demand, and interactively. In contrast to most community-wide video and transactional service models, the Media Bank assumes member contributions, multi-network distribution schema, variegated home processing capabilities and multiple, co-existing data formats