Image Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2-6
Online casino example. Source: copyright © Diogo Salari.
to anyone who wants to dial in and watch. Virtualizing a pack of cards is possible by sim-
ulating the cards on the screen, and a video-conferencing system could be used to enable
observation of facial expressions of the other players in the game.
2.8.4
Sports and News coverage
Of all the different genres of content that broadcasters provide to end users, news and
sports have some particularly important criteria that directly affect the way that video is
compressed for presentation. Figure 2-7 shows an example of the BBC News Online video
console that presents news video clips for broadband use in the United Kingdom.
News and sports are both very information-rich genres. Archiving systems tend to
be large in both cases because there is a lot of material available. The metadata associated
with the content assists the searching process and also facilitates the digital rights man-
agement (DRM) process. The content is easily accessible and widely available, but the
playback can be controlled. Video may need to be encrypted as well as encoded. Other
technologies such as watermarking are used, and these present additional technical prob-
lems. This is all addressed in more detail in Chapter 18, where DRM is covered extensively.
In general, the rights protection techniques that are available impose further loads on an
already hardworking compression system.
The nature of news content is that the material must be encoded quickly and pre-
sented as soon after the event as possible. The same is true of sports coverage, and services
BBC News Online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
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