Outline and our challenges

YOU CAN WATCH THE MUSIC CONCERT ON THE INTERNET.
Ryuichi Sakamoto, the world's famous musician contributed to YMO and the main theme of the movie "Last Emperor," and Toshio Iwai, an interactive media artist, will play great music with audiences on the Internet.
We have decided the experiment of broadcasting will be held on the schedule -- in the evening on 16th of December, 1996 (JST)
Through this experiment, we expect to show the power of video/audio broadcasting with commercial available software, and to examine how it works over the AI3 environment. The audio and video will be fed to Indonesia and Hong Kong from Japan. This event was designed as an official domestic event in Japan presented by Internet 1996 World Expo, however, we achieved to get it also for Asian countries. You may get more information about the concert from http://japan.park.org/Japan/1216/index-e.html

The concert is held at Mito Tower Hall, north of Tokyo. It is aways from AI3-IX over 600km.
Enjoy!

How to join the concert

To watch and listen to the broadcast, you may use a multimedia player such as StreamWorks.
You can get StreamWorks clients from Xing Technology Corp.

• Download Page

We provide several StreamWorks Network Server for the propagation of the concert. Below is the list of the addresses:

• Click here to Hibiya IWE Network Center (Tokyo)
• Click here to Kyusyu Univ. (Fukuoka)

Especially for AI3 partners, we also provide a exclusive server at AI3-IX (Nara) for a better quality of distribution. To join this concert from AI3 partners side, try following address:

• Click here to AI3-IX (AI3 partner only)

With a StreamWorks broadcasting we will also provide low bandwidth sound with RealAudio. We have only a RealAudio Server at the concert hall in Mito, Japan. Unfortunately we could not arrange RealAudio redistribution server only for AI3, so you may get worth quality with it. Anyway try this :-)

• Mito Tower Hall

You cat get RealAudio clients from Progressive Networks.

• Download Page

CAUTION!!

We are very sorry to announce that there are troubles occured in transport satellite communication, so the trasfer rate will be changed from 2M to 768K now.

We will try our best to make it recover during the concert time.

Technical View

Satellite Datalink

We provide two satellite datalinks for this program. One is provided by JCSAT-1 which has a bandwidth of 2Mbps and uses WIDE JC driver for multicast link. The other is provided by JCSAT-3 with a bandwidth of 1.5Mbps, connectted between Japan and partners, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Details of this Network are shown in the following figures (planed).

The detail of the AI3-IX follows.

Applications

• Stream Works
  Stream Works "Encoder" is located at Art Tower Mito. Video is distributed to several "Network Server" in Japan via JCSAT-1. Network Servers are placed at
  • Hibiya IWE Network Center (Tokyo)
  • Keio Univ. SFC (Fujisawa)
  • Kyusyu Univ.(Fukuoka)
  • AI3-IX (Nara)

  We send data simultaneously by using IP multicast from the Encoder to the Network Servers, . The server at AI3-IX relays and delivers the broadcast to Stream Works clients in Indonesia and Hong-Kong via JCSAT-3.

Issues in this experiment

• We have no StreamWorks redistribution servers in each connected AI3 partner side. In this case, AI3's satellite datalink will be used as the transport which will carry multimedia informations such as piano's realtime sounds and vision of the player Ryuichi Sakamoto using "unicast" approach.
  
• The number of connection between server and clients must be hold under a limitted number since the bandwidth of the satellite datalink is only 1.5Mbps.
• Since RealAudio Server is only placed only at Mito this time, we cannot ensure enough quality for clients far away from Mito.
• At the begining of this project, we have planed to broadcast IP/TV inside Japan using multicast application such as "vic", "vat". However, since we have no enough stuffs and time for preparing the environments, this plan have been canceled.

Notes

• Mbone has not been constructed in AI3-NET yet. Thus, we cannot use "multicast" applications such as IP/TV to watch multimedia data within AI3-NET. It is nessesary to construct Mbone in AI3-NET if we want to use multicast application in the future.
• It is found that there are no enough bandwidth between IWE and AI3-IX connection for transmitting realtime stream. We consider to build more wide bandwidth AP(Access Point) in future.
• We only prepare redistribution server at Japan side of the AI3-NET for using multimedia application such as StreamWorks and RealAudio at this time. Thus it cause multiple application-specific unicast connections in the satellite datalink provided by JCSAT-3(1.5Mbps).