CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

World Wide Web Consortium
Workshop
"Real Time Multimedia and the Web"
(RTMW '96)

October 24-25, 1996
INRIA-Sophia Antipolis - France

POSITION PAPER

Our job, in support of the Italian telecom operator (TELECOM ITALIA), is mainly aimed at testing and evaluating real-time applications over the Internet; TELECOM ITALIA offers both low and medium bandwidth access to the Internet (commercial) and high bandwidth backbone networks= (experimental). The typical real-time applications we consider are video-conference= applications and audio/video streaming with a particular reference to their= implementation on PC/Windows platform; we realize that the distribution of audio and video integrated with the Web is gaining quick and large success.

In our experience some main outstanding issues are:

• lack of interoperability among products from different manufacturers, which means several coexistent insulated operating environments, or full dependence from a manufacturer; A standard application protocol (RTP) would be of great benefit, but a standard encoding should be considered too.
• unsatisfactory quality of the perceived audio and video quality, even if the throughput capabilities of the network are high. This could depend both on the lack of products for PCs explicitly designed for high bandwidth networks (it is the case of most audio players, designed for modem access to the Internet) or on the performances of the actual CPUs (SW decoders vs. HW decoders)
• need for a better QoS from the network; a best effort performance may be inadequate for good quality real-time applications both in terms of bandwidth and of latency
• need for a better integration of multimedia players within the web browser (plug-in applications, helper applications, HTML extensions, ...)
• need for a better integration between the Web servers and the= audio/video servers.

We are confident that the forthcoming workshop will give a good chance to establish a common view among the participants; that=92s why we are very interested in participating.

We apology for submitting this application a bit late after the deadline of September 6 and hope you can still accept it.