Future multimedia systems - new challenges for design, automation and testing

A plethora of R&D activities world-wide aim at designing new, fascinating and profit-yielding multimedia systems. Acknowledging the fact that it will be impossible to cover the wealth of these developments entirely, the speaker highlights a selection of current trends in the development of multimedia services and their underlying technical systems. Source coding of audio and video signals plays a fundamental role in most multimedia systems and significant new developments can be reported. Which communication channels will be used for these source-encoded signals and which kinds of terminals will they address? Future personal communications devices will include medium-resolution colour displays and therefore will be the ideal terminal for many new forms of multimedia services. The use of 'hybrid networks' consisting of a 2G, 2.5G or 3G mobile communications network and an additional broadband downstream will offer tremendous new possibilities to the user. As chairman of the DVB Technical Module, the speaker is heading the major international standardisation forum in the field. In this keynote address, he shares his view on the future of multimedia.