Internet Transcoding for Universal Access

More and more pervasive devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), hand-held computers, smart phones, TV browsers, wearable computers, and other mobile devices are gaining access to the Internet and other multimedia-rich information sources.  However, the capabilities of these devices to receive, process, store and display Internet content vary widely. Given the variety of client devices, it is difficult for Internet content publishers to tailor the content to individual devices.

Enabling universal access of multimedia content has become increasingly important. Universal access describes the mechanism for adapting multimedia content to the constraints of the client devices.  As an example,  a smart phone can access a text document through the use of text-to-speech synthesis.

To enable universal access in the coming age of pervasive computing, we are developing a system that tailors the content of web pages for pervasive computing devices.  This tailoring process is called transcoding.  The transcoding system adapts video, images, audio and text to the individual pervasive devices using a new framework that allows the content to be summarized , translated and converted, on-the-fly.

Please try out some of the IBM Internet transcoding demos and let us know what you think.