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Desktop Video AGOCG Report

Introduction

A precise meaning of DTV is unclear, primarily as a result of the plethora of applications for what is intrinsically the same technology. The report has already covered the idea of a single workstation accommodating all of the different requirements of video, the videophone, the video editor, the multimedia workstation. Grass Roots Research identified five market applications of multimedia; corporate training and presentations, desktop videoconferencing, education, consumer and sales support (kiosks). This report will focus on video communication, videomail, presentations/education and video editing.

Video communication is not primarily being packaged as a standalone, phone-like device, but rather on the back of personal computers. The integration of video into PCs offers much more than the ability to see the person on the other end of the line: content rich video will enable all kinds of collaborative work.

New products from Apple and Silicon Graphics exemplify the trend to support motion video in desktop systems. As mentioned earlier, the Silicon Graphics Indy and two Apple Macs the Centris 660AV and the Quadra 840AV include hardware for input and output of analogue video, video digitisation, digital signal processing for image manipulation and compression and software support for handling video data. The Indy even includes a tiny video camera as standard equipment. This means that a system is now available to handle video straight out of the box. This is in preference to relying on third party vendors such as SuperMac, RasterOps and Creative Labs, running with system level software support like Apple's QuickTime and Microsoft's Video for Windows and having to purchase additional hardware.

Video will be incorporated into existing software such as presentation packages; word processors, databases and even spreadsheets will support video clips and annotations. Electronic mail packages will add support for video attachments to messages. Multimedia titles will become richer, more dynamic and more widely distributed. However, perhaps the most significant potential of DTV lies with video communication.

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