While the many variables involved in creating commercially viable broadband media services are in place, there are still some challenges that need to be addressed and overcome by network and service providers. Building a scalable and reliable end-to-end network for on-demand entertainment is a large undertaking, and several technological and legal factors are involved in bringing large amounts of content to consumers.

Digital technology standards

While broadband media and IP standards are in rapid development and are given frequent enhancements, incompatible proprietary streaming-media technologies still exist. Similarly, not all content creators have adopted digital distribution strategies required for delivering broadband media services. This is changing quickly, however, as more large media conglomerates are signing deals with content providers to provide digital content to consumers.

Broadband content for mobile users

In the near future, third-generation mobile communication systems will extend the scope of today's Internet broadband solutions by introducing standardized broadband media services that target the mobile user's specific needs. Third-generation systems will provide high-quality streamed Internet content to the rapidly growing mobile market. These systems will offer value-added applications, supported by an underlying network that combines broadband media services with a range of unique mobile-specific services. Mobile application scenarios present many challenges, such as how to provide spectrum-efficient broadband media services over different radio-access networks to different types of end-user terminals and devices. Next-generation network architectures that fit seamlessly into third-generation mobile-communication systems are in development that will address the diversity and unique UI attributes of content on mobile devices.

Seamless content storage and retrieval

The amount of content involved in delivering broadband media services to businesses and consumers will be staggering. Research on indexing, storing, and creating retrieval mechanisms for multimedia archives inspires several directions for future developments and opportunities for additional revenues for entrepreneurial companies. For example, existing genre-classification and topic-detection methods require processing and analyzing large parts of a document, an even greater challenge when performed on live streams. New ways of indexing and categorizing network content will be created to improve organization and access to content. Scalability plays an important role in deploying such systems, given the amount of computation required for simultaneous processing of multiple streams. Fortunately, rapid progress in CRM networking is enabling deployment of new systems for tracking, disseminating, and billing customers for content consumption.

Who owns the content?

Content rights and distribution have become one of the hottest issues in the industry as a result of several well-publicized cases of copyright infringement lawsuits. The questions include the following: Who owns the distribution rights? Who owns access to the customer? How does digital content distribution affect the industry business model? need to be worked out and real-life implementation of advanced media services will require legal documentation on the limits and extent of responsibilities of each participant in the broadband media services value chain. Other issues that are being addressed in broadband media services deployment include the following:

• Maintaining a balance between data compression and media quality. Enhancing MPEG standards as digital content develops by introducing new, better methods for compressing data size, yet maintain its quality.
• Access in remote areas. Ensuring widespread adoption of the client-server architecture to ensure network delivery of content across a broad geographic area, from cities to remote areas.
• IP security network security. Ensuring reliable, continuous security and authentication and verification of users in the network.