Applications for Mobile Multimedia

Compression for Mobile Multimedia

The merger of a large Internet Service provider and a GSM operator has created a powerful company that is ready to offer Mobile Multimedia services. Two vice-presidents have opposing views on how to position towards the customers the interactivity of this service. Each one claims that his/her strategy is the best. Your task, as advisory engineering firm, is to give well founded support for one of the views or to present your own strategy.

For one part there is full agreement: the new service will make use of the MPEG4 compression standard. The object oriented approach of this standard will enable all interactive multimedia services that are expected in the foreseeable future.

However, what interactivity primarily means is the basis of a serious dispute between Mr. Levevre(interactivity = conversational mode) and Ms. Jones(interactivity = user selection). The board of the company has to choose clearly for one of the two strategies, otherwise it will confuse its customers and loose market share.

Defending his strategy aimed at video conferencing and shared applications , Mr. Levevre argues that the interactivity of the new service should be positioned as "you see who and what you deal with". Video conferencing and shared applications is really the follow-up of the successful interaction already known from mobile telephony. The new MPEG4 standard makes this possible and will include efficient compression techniques that let also the mobile user conduct business as usual.

Defending her strategy aimed at stressing the user's ability to select the audio and video objects that are of most interest, Ms. Jones argues that the interactivity of the new service should be positioned as "you choose what you want". Giving the mobile user the possibility of Web browsing, including animated or natural moving pictures, is really what the user wants. Although video conferencing is possible, this will not be attractive given the compression delays that will be too large with the limited power of a mobile terminal.

What is your advice? Choose for a positioning that (you believe) will give the most satisfied customers. Try to be as specific as possible. Find out how much (computing) power is needed for video compression. Your report should also include a requirements specification of the capabilities and performance (i.e. numbers on delay, reliability, quality) of the service to be marketed.

Your quality as Mobile Multimedia Consultant (i.e. your grade) will be judged from:

Presence during introductions and participation in discussions.

And, if you have chosen for this assignment, from the effort + quality by which the points below are executed by your engineering firm (i.e. by you and your group):

Two sheets with bullet points, supporting the relative advantages of the Levevre or Jones strategy, respectively. These sheets will form the starting point of the discussion. It will help you in working out your report.
The report (already mentioned above) detailing the advice of your engineering firm.
A 20 minute presentation of your report.
A management summary of, say, two or three screens, written in HTML, that convinces the board that your choice is the best way to proceed.