Reuters and the W3C Workshop - Television and the Web
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Reuters is a major supplier of news and information products to the World's
media and financial communities.  Its television interests include the largest
international news agency, supplying over 400 broadcasters around the globe,
and a highly-focused live television service for the financial sector produced
in London, New York and Tokyo.  At the same time, Reuters involvement in the
Web is very substantial both in the Company's own sites and the supply of vital
news and information to third parties.

Reuters produces a rich mix of video, still pictures, graphics, text and
financial data, and is seeking to use technology convergence and the developing
standards of the Web to combine these media in ways which will deliver more
interesting and rewarding experiences to the end-users.  There is a strong
desire to use standards to guarantee compatibility and ease reuse and
re-authoring of content by third parties.

Areas of interest include:

        Streaming of multimedia content
                To televisions and PCs
                Live (real-time) and on-demand
                Minimal latency of live content
                Interactivity within stream/object
                Local caching of streams
        Production methods and standards
                What standards?  SMIL or ASF?
                Production of live TV and linked Web content
                Authoring tools for above
        Metadata
                Standards for?
                Sub-indexing within stream/object
                Linking related streams/objects
                Control of distributed caching
        Protocols
                Multicast
                Security issues
                Resistance to UDP-based delivery to corporate LANs
                Multicast via IP-over-DVB satellite (MPEG)
                Local caching of above
        User interfaces
                TV and PC
                Flexible and extensible
 
Reuters wishes to use this workshop to extend its understanding of the
convergence of TV and the Web and to contribute to the debate as a major
content provider.