An alternative paradigm for scalable on-demand applications: evaluating and deploying the Interactive Multimedia Jukebox

Straightforward, one-way delivery of audio/video through television sets has existed for many decades. In the 1980s, new services like pay-per-view and video-on-demand were touted as the "killer applications" for interactive TV. However, the hype quickly died away, leaving only hard technical problems and costly systems. As an alternative, we propose a new jukebox paradigm offering flexibility in how programs are requested and scheduled for playout. The jukebox scheduling paradigm offers flexibility ranging from complete viewer control (true video-on-demand), to complete service provider control (traditional broadcast TV). We first describe our proposed jukebox paradigm and relate it to other on-demand paradigms. We also describe several critical research issues, including the one-to-many delivery of content, program scheduling policies, server location, and the provision of advanced services like VCR-style interactivity and advanced reservations. In addition, we present our implementation of a jukebox-based service called the Interactive Multimedia Jukebox (IMJ). The IMJ provides scheduling via the World Wide Web (WWW) and content delivery via the Multicast Backbone (MBone). For the IMJ, we present usage statistics collected during the past couple of years. Furthermore, using this data and a simulation environment, we show that jukebox systems have the potential to scale to very large numbers of viewers.