internetaudio.aes.org - Bell Harbor Conference Center - Seattle, WA, USA - June 13 - 15, 1997
Conference Schedule and Information
Discovery 1
Friday, June 13, 1:30 pm-4:30 pm

Session Title: Audio Standards: Policy and Delivery in an Open Internet World
Session Chair: Ted Hanss, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Panelist: Rob Lanphier, Progressive Networks, Seattle, Washington, USA, Jonathan Lennox, Columbia University, New York City, New York, USA
This discovery session is an opportunity for conference attendees to engage in a discussion around Internet functionality and audio standards development. We will raise as issues such questions as:
  1. How does quality of service functionality enable new types of audio applications on the Internet?
  2. What are the benefits and liabilities of standards versus proprietary approaches?
  3. How do we balance open platform and the dangers of vesting power in a monopoly?
  4. Can we, do we, guarantee licensing rights to all? And, what standards still need to be addressed in the Internet context? For the Internet to be a viable delivery platform for high quality audio, it must still evolve not simply by providing higher connectivity speeds but by enhancing the base services of the network. These new services must guarantee, on an end-to-end basis, the quality of audio delivery.
  5. Are there gaps in the current standards activities that need to be addressed?
  6. Are there proprietary approaches that are superior but limit interoper- ability due to vendor control? And, even with standards, what is the user interface to this new functionality? It's certainly not myriad, graphical dials and controls that must be manipulated for each application. In addition to the concerns about the quality of the audio delivery, many content producers are also concerned about security issues.
  7. How can, for example, privacy, intellectual property protection, and electronic payment be ensured in audio-based applications?
These, and other issues raised by attendees, will allow us to start a very interesting dialogue about Internet futures that we hope will continue beyond this session.

Biographies: Tedd Hanss, Rob Lanphier, Jonathan Lennox

Ted Hanss

TED HANSS is the Applications Lead for the Internet 2 Project, a university-led consortium effort of higher education, government, and industry to accelerate developing and deploying advanced, network-based applications on the internet. His role is the applications architect/evangelist for the next generation of internet services supporting higher education and research needs. Prior to joining the Internet 2 Project, Ted served for several years as a director/senior manager of the University of Michigan's Information Technology Division, including being Director of the Center for Information Technology Integration, a computer science research and development lab focusing on distributed systems. While now full time on Internet 2, Ted retains an adjunct faculty appointment in the U-M School of Business Administration where he teaches in the Computer and Information Systems department.

Rob Lanphier

ROB LANPHIER works at Progressive Networks, the makers of RealAudio, RealVideo, and RealMedia AS Program Maganger-Protocols. He is co-author of the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), a standards-track Internet Draft from the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Jonathan Lennox

JONATHAN LENNOX is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Columbia University, studying under Professor Henning Schulzrinne. He is researching real-time networking, particularly transmission of music-grade audio.

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