The future of multimedia

Newspaper were perhaps the first mass communication medium to employ Multimedia. However they used mostly text, graphics, and images. In past, multimedia mostly was in static, black and white, unlikely today's multimedia.

In 1895, Gugliemo Marconi sent his first wireless radio transmission at Pontecchio, Italy. A few years later around 1901, he detected radio waves beamed across the Atlantic. Initially wireless radio was invented for telegraph. Since then radio is now a major medium for audio broadcasting.

Television was the new media for the 20th century. It brings the video and has since changed the world of mass communications. Now, the internet has become the dominance in multimedia as well as the computer based application.

Now, we can see the future of multimedia such in education, entertainment, communications, shopping and retail.

With multimedia, the accessibility of education will increase. The role of teacher will also change besides being an educator. Education will become more commercialize where the learning material will be in softwares. All learning will be facilitated in an online environment and become mediated in some way.

In entertainment, the future of multimedia do applied in online gaming, video streaming as well as media on demand. For communications, technology such as 3G enables video communications, internet browsing and so on which enhances the multimedia.

For shopping and retail, traditional home shopping will be replaced by home shopping through the internet. Retail services will be easily available from home. As a result, shopping experience will be change entirely and people does not need to travel out, thus saving their time.

Multimedia do has its negative influence among the users. For example, those who always playing online game will be addicted and become a couch potato. As a result they are becoming obese and leading an unhealthy life. Some even misuse the multimedia by spreading prone or harsh video to public.

The shortcoming of multimedia, perhaps will be the network bandwidth. This is because multimedia especially video or audio steaming consumes a lot of bandwidth. If all the bandwidth been used up, other important data cannot be transmitted, thus causing network traffic and congestion.

Another shortcoming of multimedia is the speed of processing at the server. Before the multimedia is transmitted , it need to be indexed and retrieval. For example audio or speech processing and recognition, image processing and coding and video segmentation. If too many people request the data at the same time, no doubt the transmission will be delay.

Therefore, it is necessary for us to upgrade and maintain the multimedia to its top so that the next generation can benefit from it.