Media Delivery Systems Research Articles

Proximity

Proximity has helped practitioners and scholars to determine newsworthiness for generations. Emerging mobile technologies, though, with contextual-awareness capabilities, have been complicating many of the related issues and expanding the realm of journalistic content—as well as conceptualizations of timeliness—through growing digital tethers to place and use of that material in place. Those evolving complexities include the increasing possibilities for journalists to make connections to contemporary audiences through the customization of content based on matters of user location. In turn, where an audience member is located when media is delivered can matter greatly. Geolocation metadata has become ubiquitous and media delivery systems can sort that data to customize user experiences based on place. In terms of such tailoring, mobile devices allow novel kinds of personalized connections to journalism, prompted by a geographical nearness to physical stimuli. In response, this study examines the potential of proximity for impact on key factors of engagement, through the involvement, social facilitation, and satisfaction of users. This conceptualization of mobile journalism shows that media designers now not only can know precisely where their particular audience is but also adapt their messages to the situation as a way to generate more engaging experiences.

Video from the Void: Video Spectatorship, Domestic Film Cultures, and Contemporary Horror Film

IN I998, JUST A FEW MONTHS BEFOREthe release of The Blair Witch Project, the low- budget motion picture The Last Broadcast ap- peared on the festival circuit. Billed as the first desktop feature The Last Broadcast was the first feature-length motion picture filmed, edited, and screened entirely using digital tech- nologies.1 Like The Blair Witch Project, The Last Broadcast is presented as a documentary fo- cusing on a group of enterprising documentary filmmakers who enterthe woods in orderto in- vestigate a legendary monster, never to return. The filmmakers, a group of publicity-hungry young men with a cable-access show called Fact or Fiction, enter the woods in search of a local legend known as the Jersey Devil. However, unlike Blair Witch, Broadcast func- tions less as a horror film and operates more as a satire of documentary filmmaking, specifi- cally documentaries that focus on overturning court verdicts. In fact, several of the interviews are carefully juxtaposed with found footage in orderto discredit both the interviewees and the video images themselves. In this sense, The Last Broadcast exposes itself as a construc- tion, with the documentary filmmaker actively producing the meaning of the film. Thus, the film explicitly invokes fears of video and the Internet in its satire of documentary authenticity through the unverifiable horror film figure, the Jersey Devil. The Last Broadcasts satirical approach to reality television and investigative documentary offers a welcome challenge to other, more recent horror films that take as their subject the home spectator, the horror film fan who repeatedly watches his or her favorite horror films from the comforts of home. This article examines the ongoing attempts to negotiate the economic, social, and political changes represented by the domestic film audience through a series of media-sawy horror films that engage with the practices and habits associated with watching movies at home. In this cycle of horror films, television, video, and the Internet appear as threats to the stability and safety of human subjects, challenging not only the status of cinema itself but also the stability of the nuclear family, specifically through the reconfiguration of the relationship between public and private space. These films seem to imply that electronic media will lead to fragmented social relationships because of their illusion of authenticity and their potential to further isolate people from a larger community. Moreover, the films seem to imply, because of their emphasis on perceived threats to documentary authenticity, that TV, video, and the Internet will undermine our grounds for interpretation and knowledge. My focus here is on the cycle of recent horror films that are concerned with TV, video, and the Internet, from the 1990s and early twenty-first century, including The Blair Witch Project (1999), Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), The Ring (2002), FeardotCom (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Ring 2 (2005), White Noise (2005), and Cloverpeld (2008). I concentrate on two films, The Blair Witch Project and The Ring, and how they navigate the tensions between film, TV, and video. For the most part, I have consciously decided to exclude horror film parodies, such as the Scream films, from this study because they focus less on the media delivery systems themselves and instead merely parody horror film genre conventions. The Scream trilogy relies heavily on horror film fans, mostly teenagers, who Immediately recognize the trilogy's allusions to past horror films, in part because of their familiarity with these films through repeat viewings on VHS or cable television; however, the media-sawy horror films after The Last Broadcast, even though many of them do bear intertextual relationships to past horror films, seem less invested in hyperpostmodern allusiveness and more focused on theorizing the practices of watching horror movies and the processes of media change associated with the introduction of new technologies such as the DVD. …

Media Streaming With Network Diversity

Today's packet networks including the Internet offer an intrinsic diversity for media distribution in terms of available network paths and servers or information sources. Novel communication infrastructures such as ad hoc or wireless mesh networks use network diversity to extend their reach at low cost. Diversity can bring interesting benefits in supporting resource greedy applications such as media streaming services, by aggregation of bandwidth and computing resources. Typically, overlay network architectures compensate for lack of quality-of-service guarantees in the network by introducing redundancy in the media delivery system through network diversity. They can support efficient multimedia services when routing, coding, and scheduling algorithms are able to adapt to both the media information and the dynamic network status. This paper presents an overview of the distributed streaming solutions that profit from network diversity in order to improve the quality of multimedia applications. We discuss the coding techniques used for adaptive and flexible media streaming with network diversity. We describe the problem of media streaming with path diversity and focus on routing, path computation, and packet scheduling problems in multipath networks. Then, the advantages of server or source peer diversity in collaborative streaming solutions are discussed. Lastly, we present an overview of wireless mesh networks and focus on the typical constraints imposed by these novel communication models on media streaming with network diversity.

A distributed admission control model for QoS assurance in large-scale media delivery systems

Conventional admission control models incur some performance penalty. First, admission control computation can overload a server that is already heavily loaded. Also, in large-scale media systems with geographically distributed server clusters, performing admission control on each cluster can result in long response latency, if the client request is denied at one site and has to be forwarded to another site. Furthermore, in prefix caching, initial frames cached at the proxy are delivered to the client before the admission decisions are made. If the media server is heavily loaded and, finally, has to deny the client request, forwarding a large number of initial frames is a waste of critical network resources. In this paper, a novel distributed admission control model is presented. We make use of proxy servers to perform the admission control tasks. Each proxy hosts an agent to coordinate the effort. Agents reserve media server's disk bandwidth and make admission decisions autonomously based on the allocated disk bandwidth. We develop an effective game theoretic framework to achieve fairness in the bandwidth allocation among the agents. To improve the overall bandwidth utilization, we also consider an aggressive admission control policy where each agent may admit more requests than its allocated bandwidth allows. The distributed admission control approach provides the solution to the stated problems incurred in conventional admission control models. Experimental studies show that our algorithms significantly reduce the response latency and the media server load.

Designing On-line Chinese Language Courses: New Roles for Educators

The purpose of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it will review the theories and practice of on-line learning and the need for new roles in the development of new media delivery systems. Secondly, the current status of university teachers will be analyzed within the context of the new roles. And thirdly, new roles for teachers and course designers in their endeavors to assimilate information technology (IT) into on-line teaching systems are identified. This paper suggest that most universities today still haven’t fully understood the importance of IT in education and haven’t adopted appropriate strategy and measurements in response to the im-pact of IT on education. One clear example, as pointed out by many researchers, is that universi-ties still focus on research production and ignore the teaching practice. An immediate result from this ignorance of teaching practice is inadequate teacher education and training. This situation is getting worse with the rapid development of IT, which affects all parts of educational system. Many universities understand the importance of online courses driven either by the idea of poten-tial loss of future educational market share or merely wanting to cut down daily running costs. One of the strong growing areas is foreign language teaching or LOTE (Languages Other Than English) due to the impacts of educational globalization. Many websites have been set up and many LOTE course are offered online. These online language courses are designed and imple-mented by different teachers with various backgrounds. Many of these online courses are poorly designed. For example, some courses are identical to a textbook or have “digitalized” a textbook online. Putting a textbook online does not mean an online course. Many online language courses lack interaction; the traditional way of course delivery can be seen everywhere whereas individu-alization of course content can rarely be found. All these phenomena point to one source: inade-quate education of teachers. The paper suggests that a qualified Chinese online teacher should possess four macro skills: be digitally literate, be a creative thinker, be a multi-skills possessor, and be a learning facilitator. Firstly, teachers should possess adequate knowledge that is appropriate for particular purposes. They also need the ability to find eas-ily the right information from vast amounts of information sources and have the ability to evaluate such in-formation. Secondly, a teacher should be innovative, elaborating, and a combination of the two which are es-sential towards his duties. Creative thinking allows us to generate alterna-tive concepts and practices and to es-tablish solutions effective in the ex-