Deliverables Use of proprietary software solutions in experimental trials Summary: The AMUSE trials of Video on Demand planned to use a proprietary software package for the VoD service. The main reason for this was to achieve a fast start up of the trials, expending little effort on developing the application. Many difficulties arose from this solution. The main problem was the difficulty in adapting the proprietary solution to the hardware provided by the partners for the trials - the commercial supplier did not have the same goal/incentive as the partners in the project. Interest of special groups Summary: In Munich the user selection criteria for the second trial were characterized amongst others by the requirement to have users different from residential users as in the first trial. The AMUSE trial in Munich has thus made important experiences with user groups not familiar with computers and multimedia services at all. For some weeks many people were asked to participate in the field trial: house-owners, representatives of schools, foreign language institutes, and municipal institutes. Finally, a girls' school, a municipal museum, a home for senior citizens, a students' home, a monastery, and a T-Punkt shop declared their interest to become customers of the trial. The trial has shown that the inhibition level can be dramatically lowered by training. Forum on Multimedia Service and Content Provisioning initiative Summary: Main scopes of the Forum initiative originated by the project are the creation of a meeting place for the different expertises needed in the multimedia business and the dissemination of the Project results among interested professionals Several Forum editions have been organized during the project lifetime in Italy, Iceland and Portugal, with a very high number of interested participants, representing leading companies, not only in the multimedia area. Main issues under discussion - Impact of Multimedia services on goods selling chain - Impact of Copyright on and from Multimedia Services - Interface between Content and Service Providers - Role of advertising in the delivery of Multimedia Services - Electronic Commerce - Distance Learning The Forum results have been very positive and awareness has been raised in many of the future actors of the interactive multimedia play. Also project partners gained a thorough knowledge of the various problems associated with the new rules and trends associated with multimedia service provisioning over the Internet and future broadband networks. Exploitable results Analysis of the relationship between interactive multimedia and the Internet The AMUSE project has carried out experiments on the provision of interactive and distributive multimedia services to real residential users. The system analyses the relationship between interactive multimedia and the Internet, as well as the possibility of accessing them via different pieces of terminal equipment, from personal computers (PC) to set-top boxes, carefully considering the evolution of the latter towards network computing devices. These services have been demonstrated in field trials carried out in different islands, using an end to end ATM infrastructure (from terminal equipment to multimedia server), through various types of access networks. %The main purpose of the project was the setting up and thereafter of field-trials, covering the provision of advanced multimedia services to real residential users through an end-to-end ATM infrastructure. The project made use of advanced solutions to assess a range of problems associated with the provision of these services, and carried out a number of related experiments on different islands, assessing both the service provision domain and the technological domain. The project performed demonstrations with a two-phase approach, where various access network alternatives and offered applications basically characterized each individual phase. Also, the Multimedia Technology Laboratory has developed an application called 'POLL' that will allow residential users to evaluate the content of the services by voting in an electronic poll-questionnaire mailed to each project co-ordinator to complete on behalf of the project consortium. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
