Real-time video-on-demand system based on distributed servers and an agent-oriented application
Minoru Takahata, Akira Uemori, Hirotaka Nakano · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
This video-on-demand service is constructed of distributed servers, including video servers that supply real-time MPEG-1 video & audio, real-time MPEG-1 encoders, and an application server that supplies additional text information and agents for retrieval. This system has three distinctive features that enable it to provide multi viewpoint access to real-time visual information: (1) The terminal application uses an agent-oriented approach that allows the system to be easily extended. The agents are implemented using a commercial authoring tool plus additional objects that communicate with the video servers by using TCP/IP protocols. (2) The application server manages the agents, automatically processes text information and is able to handle unexpected alterations of the contents. (3) The distributed system has an economical, flexible architecture to store long video streams. The real-time MPEG-1 encoder system is based on multi channel phase-shifting processing. We also describe a practical application of this system, a prototype TV-on-demand service called TVOD. This provides access to broadcast television programs for the previous week.