On-demand regional television over the Internet

Abstract

We present a regional news on demand television service over the Internet develo~d for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), using a distributed video server and a WWW-integrated software-only MPEG-1 video player. Video is played diiectly over the net from the server source, thus avoitlng download of a video file. As far as we know this is the first regular real-time news-on-demand service where a television stXion on a daily basis digitizes a full news transmission and makes it available to the public over the Intemet. We describe the overall system architecture and outhe the production process digitizing daily newscasts. The MPEG-1 video player developed in the project is described in some detail and the communication and audio/ video synchronization issues are discussed in particular. KEVWORDS