Widespread and affordable broadband access opens up opportunities for delivery of new streaming services, making ICT crucial to European growth and quality of life. The networked future however, is not envisaged to be simply a faster way to go online. What is expected to fundamentally change the way that people use the network is the ability to produce, and seamlessly deliver and share their own multimedia content.

SEA consortium is confident that in a few years everyone will be multimedia content producer (by publishing digital pictures, video recordings, remote e-health services, home surveillance, etc.), multimedia content mediator (by storing/forwarding streaming content) and multimedia content consumer (digital television, video on demand, mobile broadcasting and alike).

Towards this forthcoming age, SEA (SEAmless Content Delivery) project aims to offer a new experience of seamless video delivery, maintaining the integrity and wherever applicable, adapting and enriching the quality of the media across the whole distribution chain.

SEA motivation is to implement a context-aware networking delivery platform, by focusing on four key principles:

�    Multi-layered/-viewed content coding, considering the evolving H.264 SVC/MVC and their emerging successors, as the major foreseen delivery technologies over heterogeneous networks/terminals and large audiences.

�    Multi-source/-network content streaming offering on-the fly content adaptation, increased scalability and enriched PQoS by dynamically combining content layers or representations of the same resource, transmitted from multiple sources and/or received over multiple networks.

�    Cross-network/-layer optimisation. The network/terminal heterogeneity, also engaging P2P overlays and serving different quality and views will require cross-layer optimization, traffic adaptation and optimal use of the available network/terminal resources.

�    Content Protection. A hybrid solution for personalised content protection by means of a combination of streaming encryption, content protection and rights management for new media, covering not only the legacy content creation chain, but also the private multimedia content.

SEA will test/validate the developed technologies over three interconnected tedbeds: a) a real-time emulated lab, b) a world-wide extended P2P testbed (PlanetLab) and c) a real 2G+/3G/4G/WLAN mobile trial.

SEA aims eventually to provide citizens with the means to offer personalized A/V user-centric services, improving their quality of life, entertainment and safety.

NEWS