CONTENT PRODUCTION AND DELIVERY FOR INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA SERVICES -A NEW APPROACH

An increasing number of multimedia services are being launched, many o f which are internet based. New, reliable, low-cost services must gene rate customer demand and sustain customer satisfaction. One of the tec hnical directors from the computer games company, Sega, has been quote d as saying that 'the games platform is only an enabler; apart from pr ice, three further things are required: content, content, content'. Th is statement holds good for any interactive multimedia services, the c ontent is what the consumer is seeking to access - and indeed most of what the consumer is paying for. This paper presents a framework cover ing the authoring and distributed handling of content and its associat ed metadata (i.e. data associated with the content which is used by th e application and its platform but not necessarily viewed by the end u ser, for example, a movie rating). It focuses primarily on the specifi cation of both content and metadata and discusses the relationship bet ween processes collectively operating as a generic tool-set.