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Kendra About
Overview | History | Organisation | Aims | Who | WhyOverview
Imagine watching what you want, when you want and paying for it. Then try and figure out how it's all going to work! Kendra is an open architecture, non-commercial, format independent, research project developing a transport system for content distribution over the Internet.
History
Work started on Kendra in 1996 when City University took on a 2 year research project funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Cerbernet colaborated with City University on ideas and provided real world data for modeling experimental systems. City University concentrated their investigations on adaptive streaming and intelligent caching systems.
It is important to note that none of the technology that City University produced has been incorporated into this website or the Kendra Network Trial.
See: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~jamm/research/kendra.html
Organisation
The Kendra Initiative is an independent, unaligned, open architecture research project investigating video on demand via the Internet. The focus is on building protocols and/or bringing together existing technologies to provide the entertainment industry with a platform for content distribution over the Internet. The exact structure of Kendra has not been formalised (legally) but this will be done in due course.
The name "Kendra" is not an acronym, it was chosen because it's a nice name. It just is. ;-)
Later found out that Kendra means "The Centre" in Hindi/Sanskrit. Spooky...
Aims
- Kendra is an open architecture project to develop a transport layer for distribution and delivery of high-bandwidth video content over the Internet.
- The aim is to improve the viewing experience (reducing net congestion) by hosting the content as close to the viewer as possible.
- Kendra is investigating intelligent, distributed, caching mechanisms to improve accessibility, performance and reliability while minimising storage space and network utilisation.
- Kendra is investigating tools for content copyright management and accounting systems.
- Work is underway to provide a practical test bed for this development to take place and allow useful research into video on demand over the Internet.
- Kendra is bringing together a number of industry and academic specialists to collectively build and investigate a model for future delivery of broadband content over the Internet.
Who
Kendra would not be around in its current form if it were not for the following people/organisations: Joe Pietroni for initial PHP and SQL coding work, Julie McCann (and City University) for research and support, Philip Haggar (and Westminster Digital) for encoding the Kendra Network Trial test content, John Hoare for providing video content for the Trial, Daniel Harris for maintaining this website and being a general trouble maker and, of course, all those people listing themselves as participants.
Why
Why should Kendra exist? More and more video and audio is being webcast over the Internet. The growth rate is exponential (as with all things Internet). Broadband Internet access services, such as ADSL and cable modem, are currently being rolled out in many countries. Increasing numbers of Internet users will demand high-quality (high-bandwidth) broadband content.
Soon (1 or 2 years) we will need caching servers in every city, every town, every telecoms exchange and possibly every home/office to get broadband content to everyone who has a fast connection. No one company will own all these servers. Therefore, there needs to be a transport system that all these servers can communicate on. It is Kendra's aim to help provide this transport system and push for it's take-up. See below for reasons why you should back the Kendra Initiative.
General | Access Providers | End Users | Content Distributors | Content Providers
General
It is important that Kendra Initiative should encourage both free (open source) software developers and non-free (closed source) software developers alike to participate in the project.
Access Providers
Save money on backbone bandwidth. Provide your users with broadband content and the fuel the take-up of highbandwidth connectivity.
End Users
Get rid of net-congestion. Pay for the content that you want.
Content Distributors
Get access to more content to distribute. Get access to more distribution points.
Content Providers
Get a distribution network without having to build your own edge server network. Content gets mirrored close to end users so adding quality and commercial value.
Kendra Initiative
Contact Kendra Initiative - we've just moved to a new server so let us know if anything doesn't work right - thanks!
