Targeting heterogeneous multimedia environments with Web services

The number of networked multimedia platforms that are introduced into the market has increased dramatically in recent years. Current approaches to multimedia distribution do not scale to this growing set of client configurations and heterogeneous dynamic networks. We propose a distributed architecture that offers a scalable solution to multimedia publication and distribution in such heterogeneous environments. It builds upon recent standardization efforts related to Web services. This paper details the multimedia Web services at the proxy server, that cooperate on a loosely coupled basis to tailor content creators' multimedia presentations to clients' environments. The experiments show that our Web service-oriented architecture offers a significant added value in heterogeneous multimedia environments.