Personal virtual multimedia library (PVML) in a converged network

Abstract

There is lot of personal multimedia content (audio, image, video) being generated due to the ease of generating such content with the everyday devices, such as, mobile phones and also due to the plummeting cost of media-generating devices, such as, digital cameras which have made them ubiquitously available. Almost everyone wants to share his/her personal content with family and friends. In addition to this sharing, there needs to be proper mechanism of accessing this content by technically non-savvy people. This is more so a requirement for the masses in an emerging economy like India where broadband access is almost non-existent, and for the elderly people everywhere, who use TV as their main device for accessing media. We present a system, which sits in the Internet cloud, simplifies content upload and organization, and allows seamless sharing and access of the multimedia content across networks and devices. Most importantly, the content can be accessed from any one of the 3 types of screens: web/PC, mobile, TV. The system hides all the complexity of the storage, formatting, and organization of the media content from the users. Performance evaluation of the system shows that it is robust against variations of bandwidth, delay and jitter in a mobile wireless network and is reasonably scalable with the increase in the number of users.