Onion interest in web television – Abstract submitted to W3C

Enrico Fagnoni - ef@onion.it

Abstract

Onion (http://net.onion.it/) is a small and fast-growing company based in the north of Italy. Our primary mission is to merge new technologies with customer’s business needs.

We operate both in local and international market and we see in the private and local TV networks and intranets a potential market for Web Television technologies, mainly at service and technology provider level. We would like participating to the workshop on Television and the web mainly in order to be up-to-date on the state of the art in this research but also to share opinions with other people interested in these topics.

ONION experiences in "web television" like applications

Since the beginning of 1995 Onion tried to use the web as a support for real-time video. We developed a prototype for remote video surveillance and video transmission (Onion web movie player) based on Netscape 1.1 mime multi-part extension. The product was able to deliver about 1 frame per second on Netscape Browser without needs of plug-ins.

We deployed this product to some customers with good results.

In 1997 we experienced a strong integration between web and video conference within the EPIC project ( more info at http://epic.onion.it/ ) in which a TCP/IP video conference tool is tightly integrated with a synchronous navigation tool developed by Onion ( ONION Synchronet).

Future works

At present we are testing web television integration in Microsoft Windows 98 and we are developing a more deep integration between our Synchronet server and PC based H.323 MCUs.

In this framework we are investigating the opportunity to integrate web television technologies into private and local TV networks that already implement an Intranet architecture in order to provide services like "remote surveillance", "remote training", "technical help desk".