Multimedia on the web - editorial

Abstract

Streaming video has recently surpassed peer-to-peer networks in terms of network capacity hunger. Reports estimate a share of 40 % of peak network capacity dedicated to entertainment, mostly streaming video. A large share of this traffic originates from web-based services. YouTube alone takes up to 8 % of the prime time Internet traffic. While transmission currently works in a best effort system, multimedia information systems on the web are far from being perfect. Retrieval, annotation, validated and useful metadata, reliable and trusted services, and user interaction and context-based adaptation are still under discussion and issues to research. Currently, the Web itself faces dramatic changes, looking for example at the spread of social networks, like Facebook, Twitter or the YouTube community, which become part of everyday life of more andmore people. Technologies like Linked Data, HTML5,WebM, orWebRTC are enablers that make these changes possible and let people experience the Web without knowing details about technology. Also the availability of theWeb has changed a lot. Many people create multimedia data on the go, put videos and photos on microblogs, or share audiovisual data with their loved ones or colleagues. These activities also have a deep effect on multimedia data formats and usage, multimedia systems and multimedia service providers. “Multimedia everywhere” was a common concept before, but this has changed to “relevant media at your finger tips”, so new methods for finding, annotating, sharing, remixing, summarizing, transmitting, storing and consuming multimedia data have to be found. Multimed Tools Appl (2014) 70:821–826 DOI 10.1007/s11042-013-1729-9