The paper describes many of the opportunities, issues, risks and challenges facing providers of multimedia products and services as today's computer, entertainment, consumer electronics and telecommunication industries converge into a single multimedia information industry. Most of the current research efforts in distributed multimedia applications development are geared towards solving problems by simulating a prototype in a laboratory-controlled environment. In practice, extending and scaling these prototypes to service poses many issues, impediments and challenges. A number of these issues are described, along with how they can be resolved through critical multimedia platforms and technologies. An in-depth study of two significant applications, videoconferencing and video on demand, illustrate the opportunities and challenges currently experienced by distributed multimedia applications. Also, studies of architectures, requirements, challenges, trends, value added services, as well as what the future holds for these applications, are included.
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