Computational capability and network speeds have increased significantly for several years, enabling the development of multimedia applications and tools previously thought to be too complex and resource intensive. New audio- and video-based applications are being developed including programming-on-demand services, remote conferencing/collaboration, and WWW-based multimedia document retrieval. Furthermore, advances in network technology allow these applications to reach a growing number of people in their homes, at work, and in school.

This talk discusses the challenges associated with improving performance and scalability of large-scale, interactive multimedia systems. Improvements in these systems, specifically in the server and network, can be made using multicast communication in the network coupled with request aggregation in the server. These techniques are applicable to a range of applications. In this talk I will describe my research into the use of multicast communication in three types of applications: Video-on-Demand (VoD), Internet Conferencing via the Multicast Backbone (MBone), and the World Wide Web (WWW). I will also discuss ongoing development of the Interactive Multimedia Jukebox (IMJ) testbed, a next-generation application combining flexible, on-demand program scheduling and multicast delivery.