Our lives have been revolutionized by three developments from the world of electronic communications: the telephone, the television, and the computer. The telephone has been a pervasive fundamental communications tool in both the home and business environments for many decades. Although life at home has been turned upside down by broadcast television for many years, TV is just beginning to seriously impact the business world. The computer is the most recent explosion in our daily lives, giving rise to vast quantities of "data" to be shared. These three signals audio, video, and data are now being merged under the new banner of multimedia.

This book describes recent developments in the technology and standards for the communication of multimedia signals. Examples of multimedia communications include the videophone (VP), video teleconferencing (VTC) (in the conference room as well as on the desktop), remote access to multimedia databases, distance learning, telemedicine, telecommuting, and telemarketing. Although much of the technology, and many of the standards, covered in this book are applicable to the world of entertainment TV, this area is not the focus. Instead, this book is concerned with person-to-person, or person-to-database, interactive multimedia communications. Communication channels used to carry these multimedia signals include the telephone network, the integrated services digital network (ISDN), local area networks (LANs), and mobile networks.

The markets for video teleconferencing and the videophone are growing rapidly. There are three major reasons for this: improved audiovisual quality, reduced cost, and communication standards. Recent breakthroughs in video andaudio compression technology are responsible for...