Summary Report on the Workshop on Advanced Digital Video in the National Information Infrastructure

C. Fenimore, B. Field, H. Frank, E. Georg, M. Papillo, G. Reitmeier, W. Stackhouse, C. Van Degrift

The development of a National Information Infrastructure (NII) is a way of putting vast amounts of information at the fingertips of users in America and around the world. Digital video is likely to he the most technically demanding NII service. Recognizing this, several industrial and governmental organizations sponsored a recent workshop to define a vision of the role of digital video in the NII; identify the architectural, scaling, and performance issues in realizing this vision; and recommend the research, experiments, and other steps to he taken to resolve these issues. At the workshop, it was broadly agreed that the NII will be an amalgam of networks, information appliances, and services in which any company may provide any service to any user. This heterogeneous system will necessarily be modular, with an extensible architecture. The components of the NII will require publicly identified reference points and interfaces. The development of high-definition television (HDTV) will be a powerful force driving the development of NII applications. It was the sense of the participants in the workshop that the Grand Alliance proposal for HDTV is the best available alternative for terrestrial broadcast of HDTV in the U.S. Additional standards for advanced digital video will he required to meet the diverse needs of the NII.

Print ISSN
Published
1995-03
Content type
Original Research
DOI
10.5594/J09635