Research Of Distributed Television Production Environment Based On Web Services Technology

With the development of IT technology, traditional linear television production method is replaced by nonlinear method. TV station is coming into a digitalizing and networking era. Now, many television production nonlinear edit networks have been established in China, and they play an important role in raising efficiency and reducing costs. However, because most of them use CIS software architecture, there are many problems such as difficult to integrate with other systems. Thus many isolated networks are formed in TV station, and this brings much inconvenience.Web Services is a new distributed computing technology, it combines the tight -coupling N-tier computing technology and the concept of loose-coupling Web together, thus allows the clients access the distant Web Services via standard network transfer protocol (HTTP). The messages of request and response are all encoded in XML format. All this makes Web Services platform-independent. The loose-coupling and platform-independent features of Web Services make it easy to integrate and inter-operate with other system. Hence, Web Services becomes the ideal technology to set up a distributed television production system.At the beginning of the paper, the principle and status quo of television nonlinear-edit network are expounded, and the problems are also pointed out. With the studies of the latest technologies and application fruits of Web Services, a distributed television production environment -based on Web Services is established. The paper not only proposes the principle and software architecture of the system, but also shows how to create and invoke Web Services. At the end of the paper, the performance of the system is discussed.Of course, establishing a Web Services based distributed television production environment must be much more complex than the paper described. There are still many difficulties, such as how to acquire the complex business logic, how to deal with the legacy system, what format to use for the multimedia material exchange, how about the safety of Web services, etc. All these need further study.