Cross-Media Service Delivery

The digitization of traditional media formats, such as text, images, video, and sound provides us with the ability to store, process and transport content in a uniform way. This has led the formerly distinct industries of media, telecommunications and information technology to converge. Cross-media publishing and service delivery are important new trends emerging in the content industry landscape. Mass-media organizations and content providers transitionally targeted content production towards a single delivery channel. However, recent economic and technological changes in the industry led content providers to extend their brands to cover multiple delivery channels. Following the content industry trend to "create once and publish everywhere" - COPE - a number of architectures, technologies and tools are being developed and deployed to facilitate the automatic conversion of content to multiple formats, and the creation of innovative multi-platform services. This approach enables the seamless access to information over different network infrastructures and client platforms.This work brings together a cross-disciplinary team of contributors to address the technical and business issues of cross-media publishing and service delivery. The contributions are organized into four different areas: the business issues driving the requirements for cross media content delivery; the architectures used for delivering content to multiple platforms; technologies that address specific practical problems; and, last but not least, concrete applications.