Media Delivery for Wireless Converged Networks

Portable devices are becoming increasingly capable of rendering high quality music and videos providing the capability for entertainment on the move. Deploying content onto those devices is often time consuming, requiring significant amounts of user intervention and prone to failure. Streaming systems can potentially offer very large catalogues, but require continuous high speed connectivity. Download and play services (e.g. podcasting) often require devices to be docked together and have catalogues limited to those chosen by the user. This paper recognizes the potential of high speed local area networks in the deployment of content to devices. It gives an overview of a method for automating the initial content transfer and the lifetime management of on-device content in a more coordinated and intelligent way than current systems. Although further work is required to realize these methods, we believe it can provide a number of benefits for both end users and service providers.