NetMedia: giving control to distributed multimedia presentation systems

Advances in multimedia computing offer new approaches to support online access to information from a variety of sources such as video, audio, images, and transparencies. The key to success in providing distributed real time retrieval, is the control of network delay and congestion to keep up the desired quality of service (QoS). We present a new distributed multimedia database environment, called NetMedia. This environment can support controlled delivery of video, audio, and text data, across Internet. NetMedia can be the base of various distributed multimedia applications. As an example we present NetMedia-Virtual-Classroom, an asynchronous distance learning tool, which uses the advantages of the NetMedia framework.