Digital multimedia content management for networked information access: issues and discussion

Along with the development of multimedia and networking technologies, more and more audio, image, animation, and video are available for average users to use and access through the Internet. Multimedia are thus playing more and more important roles in information access as well as electronic commerce. According to Euro-marketing, there are over 157 million people worldwide who have access to the Internet on a worldwide scale (that is, who have email access) or to the Web. The average users are starting to access multimedia content and will soon be looking forward to purchasing multimedia products, such as music and video, through the Internet. Therefore, techniques that facilitate easy and quick browsing, retrieval, manipulation, and secure access, transaction and purchasing of multimedia content through Internet are needed. In this paper, we investigate the potential value of e-distribution, address the technical challenges, and propose a digital multimedia content management system that facilitates easy, quick, and secure access of digital multimedia content through the Internet