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) 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.

As shown in the figure, SEA places the user acting as content consumer, content mediator and content producer, at the centre of four types of content delivery networks:

a)  Broadcasting networks e.g. terrestrial (DVB-T), satellite (DVB-S/S2), cable (DVB-C),

b)  Interactive/on demand Bidirectional networks e.g. xDSL, WiMAX,

c)  Mobile networks e.g. 3G/4G, GERAN, UTRAN, DVB-H and

d)  Mesh P2P logical overlay topologies.

Though this categorization is not a formal one, it demonstrates the heterogeneous physical and logical architecture, over which SEA aims to enable personalised, scalable, seamless and trusted multimedia content delivery, while protecting content from unauthorized access. Moreover, aims to keep bandwidth requirements low and increase the Perceived Quality of Service (PQoS).

In more details, SEA aims to introduce novel services and new business models by innovating over three key-content delivery pillars:

A)   Multi-layered/Multi-viewed content coding. SEA considers the evolving H.264 SVC (Scalable Video Coding), H.264 MVC (Multi View Coding) and their emerging standards, as the major foreseen content delivery technologies over heterogeneous networks, multiple terminals and large audiences. SVC will offer layered temporal/spatial/quality content scalability, while MVC will introduce a truly personalised video delivery experience by allowing the user to select among the different views embedded in a single video stream. Future truly free-view point applications will become available by adding depth information to MVC coded sequences.

B)  Multi-source/multi-network streaming & adaptation. SEA will offer on-the fly content adaptation, inherited resiliency and enriched PQoS by dynamically combining different content layers, views and representations of the same resource (video stream) transmitted from multiple sources (different servers or peers in case of P2P streaming) and/or received over multiple diverse paths or networks. Reconstruction of the content segments may take place either within the network (offering transparent streaming to low-end terminals) or at the end-user terminal in case multi-network connectivity is available. Cross-network adaptation and cross-layer optimization especially in P2P overlay topologies, will offer traffic adaptation (load balancing to avoid network flooding) and optimal use the available resources (bandwidth).

C)  Content Protection and lightweight asset management. New business models for large scale content distribution will be facilitated side-by-side to a proper content protection and asset management mechanism. Within SEA, personalised content protection on-the fly will be offered in the extended delivery environment, covering not only the legacy content creation chain in a Digital Rights Management (DRM)-like approach, but also the private multimedia content, which may be soon the major content category. The work will advance in the adaptation of the content protection and rights management solutions for new media in P2P networks, improving and tailoring the MPEG21-IPMP and DMP concepts to real usage cases.

SEA will test and validate the developed technologies over real testbeds and real-time emulators of various networks (3G/4G, WiMAX, ADSL and WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g/a) along with a large state-of-the art P2P testbed and a real 3G/4G network. Over this heterogeneous architecture, an innovative P2P IPTV-like application will efficiently combine and utilise all SEA networking and multimedia technological advances, validate the SEA concept and optimise the SEA platform behaviour.

SEA will eventually provide the means to distribute A/V user-centric services (infotainment, healthcare, e-learning, home surveillance), with superior quality and striking, flexibility, seamlessly in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens quality of life, entertainment and safety.