Video on Demand (VOD) has been actively pursued for the past several years. VOD would accomplish three distinct purposes in terms of community service. These include interactive distance learning, video conferencing, and entertainment. While it is the first two, video conferencing and interactive distance learning, which would serve to the best advantage in terms of education and business; it is the last, entertainment which has the most appeal to the largest number of people. The application of video on demand in terms of education and business is currently being utilized in remote learning programs and company training programs around the nation. Video on demand can take many forms. In the simplest of forms it is a series of Video Cassette Recorders (VCR) located in a control station which are networked to either homes, classrooms, motel rooms, etc. The customer simply calls in their order and a technician retrieves the tape and plays it over the centrally located VCR. This setup and slightly more complex ones which operate under similar procedures, with customers ordering only individual programs, are referred to as one-way multicast (Shenoda). Video on demand is particularly adapted to “narrowcasting” the ability of the networks to economically present specialized television programming even for small audiences (O’Brien).Transport StandardsVideo on Demand is supported by two major systems and transport standards: Telecommunication Union-Telephony (ITU-T) Recommendation H.320 Audiovisual Systems specifications and related standards and Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) systems and standards (Shenoda). Both ITU-T and MPEG were developed with the purpose of supporting compression and encoding of video and audio signals (Shenoda). They were also developed to those signals with data/graphics and control signals as well as others and to transport those through the networks which are already in existence t...
