Applications

The entire range of applications for digital video cannot be defined exhaustively, as the versatility of digital information enables the multiplexing of several media types and the creation of unforeseeable combinations between them. Currently, digital video applications include:

• Face-to-face communications, as desktop and mobile video telephony and video conferencing. Video could be delivered over IP-based networks, Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN), or mobile networks, serving home or corporate users. The connections could be point-to-point, or point-to-multipoint, the latter enabling applications such as teleworking, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), distance learning.
• Broadcast entertainment video, which could be offered in a variety of qualities, as low as the quality of streaming video currently available over the Internet, and as high as the quality of cinema films, and even higher. Digital TV applications, for which the MPEG2 standard caters, are in this category.
• Video databases, including video on demand, which is the holy grail of the media and telecommunications industries. It comprises the smart archiving of digital video, enabling search by criteria, and its delivery with one of the aforementioned network technologies.
• Telemedicine applications, which are more special than face-to-face communications, as they should enable, apart from collaborative video conferencing between medical practitioners, the high-quality, preferably lossless, encoding and transmission of medical images.

Potential future applications include object-based schemes, suitable for interactive transaction with objects on the video scene and viewpoint selection, for example, video games or virtual reality applications. Three-dimensional and stereoscopic digital video coding and transmission is also a promising research area.

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