Online Multimedia Issues - Essay Example

ONLINE MULTIMEDIA Music Online Internet is a network of networks of computers. Millions of these -big and small-are located in all nooks and corners of the world. These form the global information infrastructure (GII) which includes the web servers, global communication networks and the in numerable user terminals. Online music is the latest trend and is giving a stiff competition to the traditional and conventional multi media systems like audio cassettes, video cassettes, audio and video CD's. The hardware and software required for the GII has o be developed, produced, installed, operated and maintained. This has given birth to enormous industrial activity. Manufacturing and maintenance industry has been flourishing in the Internet era. These computers along with the latest media players should be capable of functioning in rural as well as urban environment with diametrically opposite extremes of temperature and poor quality power supply conditions. The communication systems have to use high technologies for fast transmission of enormous amount of data. Optical fibres of hundreds of thousands of kilometres are required to be laid around the earth's surface forming FLAG -Fibre optic Link Around Globe. On the other hand cellular mobile system requires modular cells to supplement the satellite based global communication system. These systems are providing Internet broadband connections that are resulting in the increase in download and upload speeds, just imagine a system with 2 MB link can do i.e., the customer can hear online streaming audio and view available online videos. The industry is also required to manufacture and supply those tiny cell terminals, which in addition to being cell phones, also provide the Internet browsing, or E-mail facility for the busy executive, who is always hard-pressed for time. The Internet system also requires large number of knowledge workers. Developing these human resources, imparting them the necessary training and continuously updating their skills have essentially become an industrial activity merely because of the amount of human resources required. IT industry has therefore a tremendous potential for employment generation for the so-called knowledge workers. According to a NGO report more than thousands of computer software professionals are trained every year across the globe to improve the Internet. A large number of the software engineers are working in the music industry across the globe to make quality music available online so that customer instssead of buying conventional music CD's can buy his/her choice of music online and thus saving time. It is expected that there will be millions of job opportunities in the music industry in the current fiscal year. Online music helping the manufacturing industry Internet has a new incarnation in industry and it is called intranet. In other words Intranet is a private network of an industrial organisation. It uses the same protocols and standards as those of Internet. Intranet structure is also similar to that of Internet. The servers and the user terminals within the company are networked together. While the servers are the repositories of the data, information, records, design, procedures, inventory, decision, policies, and everything else that is required for all the industrial activity, the required information is available to each and every functionary of the industry on his desk. The executives, for whom the distinction between home and office has already vanished, have access to the required information at anyplace and at anytime either through his home computer or through the hand held mobile terminal like Ipod's, PDA's, Simputers, MP3 players, etc. Internet system provides all the updates, modifications, and configuration control details etc., in real time to the concerned persons. Quality alerts and market pricks can be passed on to those concerned throughout the factory at the split of a second. Needles to state, the Intranet transmits and provides access to the information to the particular station only on 'Ned to know' basis hereby ensuring confidentiality, safety and security of the company information. Use of experts systems in a manufacturing set-up is well known. Multimedia configuration, software development, distributed problem solving; knowledge assembly and organisation are all facilitated because of the Intranet, which provides a dynamic temporal knowledge-based manufacturing environment. It results in a high quality, zero-defect, reliable production leading to enhanced productivity. Intranet, Internet and Extranet Intranet system can b directly connected to the Internet's World Wide Web, since their protocols and structure are the same. However, any data that goes on the Internet becomes a public domain data. A company has, therefore to build a firewall between Intranet and Internet, which will regulate the flow of data form and to the Intranet. The entire repository of information on the World Wide Web is made available to a company functionary on his Intranet terminal in an interactive mode. Following are the examples: product designs, performance details of the competitor's models, pricing, market surveys and feedbacks, patents information, latest technology advances, information on latest production tools etc. The company also can put out all its information on to the www like for example, corporate information, music quality manuals and procedures, application performance, product information and catalogues, human resource requirement, directories of approved suppliers etc. The Intranets of various companies can also get interconnected through appropriate firewalls. Such networks are called Extranet. All company-to-company transactions can take place via Extranet. Raw material procurement, OEM parts supply, consortium mattes and collaborative, dealings etc are facilitated by Extranet while saving time and expenses. Enterprise resource planning Productivity, efficiency, profitability and performance of an music enterprise depend upon the optimum utilization of human, financial and physical resources and reducing losses, Dynamic process of information gathering, long-term and short-term forecast of technology and market requirements, real time contact with the customer and knowledge of his changing requirements, real time contact with the customer and knowledge of his changing requirements can help a proper production planning, control and gainful resource utilisation. Proper inventory control is one of the key factors for the success of online music industry. Internet makes it possible to have online contacts with not only the supplier but also with the manufacturing shop, purchase & finance sections, marketing, and customer. When all these agencies are networked together a system called 'Just-In-Time (JIT)' inventory becomes feasible. The production planning can inform the supplier about the music industry requirements. The supplier will receive such requirement from various other users and schedule the production of the software application. All bottlenecks that happens in physical multimedia systems like delayed payments, transportation delays etc, can be removed because all concerned people are networked and in contact all the time. In extranet cases alternative arrangements can be made as soon as some unforeseen problems are noticed. Similarly production planning can be done in a dynamic way based on the market position and consumer contacts. Idle manpower caused by reduction in production quantities arising out of reduced market demand can be reallocated to other priority jobs. Re allocation of machinery for different products can also be done. Supply Chain Management The raw material and OEM parts are to be received from the vendors through a procedure of preferred vendor directory, tendering, purchase order, payments, receipt and inspection of incoming material. The supply of finished goods is to be affected through quality control, marketing, and distributors network and finally the goods must reach the consumer. This whole chain is efficiently managed using the Internet technologies, which basically provide the information about each aspect to each concerned person at each stage and keep updating the information in real time all the time. Music Industry Music industry is estimated to be a 2 trillion-dollar global industry by the year 2008. Many companies are targeting an annual turnover of online music industry to the tune of 100 billion US dollars in that year. The software export Industry in India is a typical example of the contribution towards industrial growth. This industry has been growing at the rate of more than 50% annually for the last six years. The online music industry's growth has been accelerated by an all out effort made by the music companies as well as other sectors. Intellectual Property and Patent Rights Internet industry is a high tech industry. Innovations and obsolescence are both extremely rapid in this field. This has led to some new phenomena. The first one relates to patenting rights and intellectual property rights. Software resides in magnetic media and is easily transferable and can be easily copied. It has become very difficult to protect the patents and IPR. A new system of copyright applicable to transient storage of digital information has now been introduced. When a book is published n the Internet, it transcends all the political boundaries jeopardising the territorial rights of the marketing organisation. To combat this situation, legal market rights related to regions are being protected. Similarly the so-called Cyber Crimes like Software piracy, hacking, endangering the privacy of individual citizens, spreading a computer virus, indulging in financial frauds, transgressing the limits of decency and social norms etc, required to be dealt with. Special Cyber laws are therefore being formed to deal with Cyber world. The recent happening in this area is related to the Napster Company, which allowed users to distribute music files to another user that clearly violation of existing laws. On the other hand due to the complexity of technology and due to the requirement of large-scale investment for R&D purposes, there is a tendency for the large industrial houses to become monopolistic. Security and Safety Software security assumes an important role, particularly when it comes to E-currency and telebanking. In the age of Internet, all the payments are being made through the net. The authentication of signatures transmitted on the net is not possible through conventional procedures and the signatures are prone to be tampered with. Hence Internet required a different type of authentication procedure, which is called digital signatures. Encrypted (coded) digital signature has to be unique for each of the six billion individuals in the world and this code must be unbreakable. Taxation Another issue relates to industrial taxation. Internet -based music industry does not recognise a political or geographical boundaries. The transactions on the net have virtual characteristics. Many of the products like software products can be transferred to the consumer through the communication channels of Internet. The worked trade Organization is faced with the problem of import duties, customs duties, excise duties, etc. and has recommended a solution of introducing zero import duty for IT products. Internet has this not only generated a huge industry of worldwide proportions but also has supported the industry in increasing the efficiency and productivity ensuring supplies of reliable product to the consumer. Internet's contribution to wealth generation has surpassed all expectations. Networked House Modern household in the age of Information Technology is a networked house. The central hub is a connection centre, something similar to the telephone exchanges of yester year. This works as a residential gateway. It is connected to the outside world through (a) Power line; (b) phone/data line; (c) wireless transmit/receive and (d) cable(Ca TC). Inside the house there re the following (1) Multimedia PC, Laptop PC, Notebook PC, Laptop PC, Notebook PC (2) Large screen surround sound intelligent TV system (3) home Cinema hall (4) Stereo surround sound musical system (5) Bank of VCRs, VCD and DVD players (6) Virtual reality suites, (7) The plain old telephone (POT) (8) Cellular phone (9) Video phone, (10) Home security system with surveillance cameras and (11) A complex of home management system, which includes lighting control, heating and air conditioning system control, refrigerator/ washing machine/ microwave oven and other appliances control. The Small Office-Home Office (SOHO) concept has now changed to integrated office, entertainment, education, shopping, banking, video conferencing and theatre complex at home. Entertainment is required for relaxation, recouping energy, increasing efficiency, removing fatigue and enhancing creativity. In the IT world, the E- entertainment has assumed the form of integrated system of edutainment, relaxation at work and home, virtual reality sports and games, visit to tourist spots on web pages, theatre, cinema halls, creative arts like painting and other cultural activities etc. the unique feature of this is that everything is available within the premises of the sweet home and there is no necessity to travel anywhere. Technology has taken away the burden of the routine chores like cooking, washing, travelling for work and shopping etc on time. It has, therefore, become possible to have ample time for entertainment in a relaxed mood. Video Entertainment The idiot box entertainment had analog form and suffered form low resolution and low frame rate. Even the high Definition TV (HDTV) never could bring a theatre quality video on a large screen so long as it was analog. These systems are being provided with Internet facility and helping in bringing the new technology called Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) into the market. It has 525 interlaced lines in which all odd lines are scanned before even lines at the rate of 30 Hz as per the NTSC standard. This imposes a limitation. The digital video has changed the entire scenario. Digital HDTV has aspect ration of 16:9 (as against analog 4:3), double the rate of scanning and two milli8on pixels per picture. Digital TV promises no ghosts, no snow, no false or artificial colours and no flicker. An absolute delight of lifelike picture is now available delight of lifelike picture is now available on your TV screen. In the Internet era, these TV signals can be transmitted form anywhere in the world to another place. Advances in communication technology has made it possible to transport the enormous amount of digital data at the rate of tens of Gigabytes per second (Giga = 109) digital video compression techniques enable the transmission of multiple number of TV channels on a single optical fibre cable. Today the innumerable web serves store a large number of video films in digital form. A system called Video on Demand provides you any movie on you home TV screen within minutes of your requisition. You can send your request thought your PC Internet terminal. It is also possible to operate the system in interactive way. You can install a set to box on you TC set. A duplex channel of the set to box is used to send and receive command control information such as pause, rewind etc. the web ATV this provides you a picture as if you are playing the tape on your home VCR. Here again the web VCR is an intelligent computer. Sitting a home you can be the director of the movie. You can change the sequences or alter the story. You can order that the hero may get killed if you feel like having a tragedy in place of comedy. E-music Instruments The earlier versions of electronic musical instruments like synthesisers use fixed frequency oscillatory activated by a switch to produce musical notes. These could not respond to the pressure a pianist applies to the piano keys. A conductor of an orchestra makes graceful movements of her hands and baton and the orchestra artists understand and follow those instructions a violins interacts with his sound -producing strings using a broad range of bow pressures and pitch choices. The bow movements of the violinist could not create any nuances of the music in electronic instruments. Musicians learn and practice the art of minute control of many parameters. These could not be interpreted by earlier E-instruments. In the electronic world today the physical parameters like the pressure of fingers required producing the acoustic sound or the parameters of the gestures can be digitally captured and sent to the synthesiser. The synthesiser decodes these signals and the desired effect can be produced on the music. For example the orchestra conductor can hold a digital baton in her hands. The acceleration of these batons when they are moved, their movements in space, finger or hand pressure applied onto them, precise position of the baton a any moment of time are the parameters which are sensed by sensors and converted into digital signals. There are gesture walls, which use the capacitance, principles and replicate the conductor's gestures in electronic media. It the conductor moves her hands slowly downward, the music goes soft. The interfaces working in conventional music production are the human -machine or human-human interactions. In computers the simplest of these interfaces between man and machine are the keyboard or the joysticks. The electronic musical instruments like synthesisers communicate with musician and controllers via Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). These MIDI messages are essentially parameters heat define musical events and tell each synthesiser what kind of sound to create. A computer in the lop undertakes the function of creating control commands out of the MIDI messages, which are understood and obeyed by the musical instrument to create precise musical events. The electronic synthesiser key boards are no more just passive witches, but are intelligent devices which can understand the strike velocity, the amount of pressure applied, and the regions or zones in which they are applied. The electronic synthesiser is thus able to create exactly the same type of musical notes that occur in a musical concert in a theatre. Edutainment Entertainment in E media gets combined with education through the Internet to provide you Edutainment. Enormous amount of educational material and knowledge is available on the web; Encyclopedia of all subjects, Atlases and maps of all countries, road maps of all cities, information about culture; history literature and anything you like to know about is now accessible through Internet browsing. It is amasing to realise that any information about any subject you can think of can be acquired through the search engines on the Internet. For scholars and research workers Edutainment is such a boon that they can advance heir careers rapidly and at the same time enjoy the work they are undertaking. Learning from the web is very effective because the material is prepared by experts and is presented to you through entertaining and amusing technological methods. A science experiment presented in multimedia form can certainly entertain you and at the same time makes you concepts clear. Interactive quiz programmes on the Net also form a good item in the edutainment repertoire. E-Games, E-Sports and E-Toys Remember the chess champion Deep Blue computer that ultimately beat world champion Gary Kasparov in a highly publicised Man versus Machine chess match in 1977 This indicates that machines can be formidable playmates in many games Computers have enormous memory, hundreds of MFLOPs (Million Floating Point Operations per second) of speed and a very powerful system capable of doing complex mathematical operations it also has capacity of three dimensional display. In the computer games the players' movements in soccer match, for example, are controlled by joystick or cursor controls. Simple games like the shooting games test the skills of fast and apt movements of the operators. Pre school kids have games that entertain them and at the same time teach them the alphabets and so on. Some of the games set you on to a real and exciting journey into the galaxy, one that fills you with a sense of wonder and discovery. In these games light and sound mix like kaleidoscope giving the player a thrill. Games can be played form the CD ROM discs or can be simply downloaded from the web. You can go for participation in car racing. You can rip apart tanks with our cannon. You can blast open buildings with a long-range missile. Better still you use a laser beam to destroy a space ship. Next to CD ROM games are the virtual reality suites. To get into this virtual environment, on has to put on number of instruments, sensors and transducers on hands, legs neck and so on. These sense the pressures, movements, force, stress, temperatures, light intensity and similar phenomena, process the data and issue control command's Let's say we are playing a virtual game of cricket. You are batting. You will see the bat on you head-up display-which is inside the helmet you are waring. Go ahead pick it up. Next a ball will roll towards you. Full toss. You swing the bat and hit hard. You can feel the impact of the ball on your bat through the sensation in you hands. The strike is a six; you can se the ball crossing the boundary. You can experience all this events while you are in your virtual reality suite and there is no ground, no stumps, no bat and no ball. All you see is only a 3 D Display on a screen, all you feel is through the sensors on your body and all you physically experience is by Electro mechanical, robot like devices which are capable of imparting force or absorbing impact. Remember the movie Jurassic Park The hole dinosaur, attacking and roaring, moving and crushing were only virtual and not actual actor, neither a biological creature nor an electro mechanical physical machine. References David Nevue. (2003). iTunes is Changing Everything. Retrieved August 22, 2006, from http://www.musicbizacademy.com/internet/itunes.htm. Chris Anderson. (2004). The Long Trail. Retrieved August 22, 2006, from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. Andy Breeding. (2004). Online Music Giving Options Increase. Retrieved August 22, 2006, from http://www.giantpath.com/news/20041216_Gift_certificates.html. Wikipedia. (2006). Historical musicology. Retrieved August 22, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_musicology. Bart Day. (2002). Releasing Your Own Record: A Legal Checklist. Retrieved August 22, 2006, from http://www.musicbizacademy.com/articles/legalchecklist.htm. Read More