By Mukta L. Kar, Ph.D. and Yasser Syed, Ph.D., Cable Television Laboratories, Inc., Sam Narasimhan, Ph.D. and Ajay Luthra, Ph.D., Motorola Broadband Communication Sector
The emerging MPEG-4 standard in development today will provide new opportunities to broadband environments. Streaming Media, enabled through MPEG-4 technologies, can create personal viewing and interactive applications, such as Video-onDemand (VoD), targeted advertising, and hotbutton interactive product purchasing. This paper will describe some of the newer capabilities added to the MPEG-4 standard that are advantageous to broadband environments. Furthermore, cable initiatives for digital local ad insertion (DVS 253 and DVS 380) will be discussed in light of digital compression technologies, such as rate-remultiplexing. We will look at how MPEG-4 can achieve this within an MPEG-2 structure and still allow for bandwidth reduction. Finally, this paper will discuss how a targeted advertising capability can result from MPEG-4 implementation.