Multimedia can be seen everywhere. It is a form of information and communication technology in a creative format integrating text, graphics, video, audio and animation in a single program. Combining this with a delivery service called the internet gives a new era in entertainment and advertising. This new digital lifestyle is emerging rapidly driving the demand for more bandwidth and ‘on-demand’ connections. The current generation at the moment is comfortable using text messaging interchanging with voice calls, but they are also craving for instant connectivity to their social networks (websites such as Facebook) and RSS weblogs are growing. A few years ago there wasn’t much video on the web. Video existed, but it was hard to find and difficult to post. You needed a web developer to post video because of the back-end coding involved. Today’s internet, however, makes posting video simple, thanks to easy-to-use websites such as YouTube as a result, there has been an explosion of video on the web

New technology in telecommunication includes utilizing IP-addressed products over a network infrastructure such as IPTV, Laser IP cameras, TiVO (Broadband Movies, Games, Content and Services) and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). These technologies are becoming more transparent and filling a communications gap allowing ordinary people and business entities to integrate video, voice, images as well as file sharing activities with various friends and clients over a broadband connection.

VoIP is a process that breaks up voice/audio into small packets of data, compresses that data to take up as little space as possible and then transferring those data packets over the Internet (or the IP). At the receiving end those small packets are reassembled back into audio, so two people can communicate over the Internet as if they were using a traditional telephone. The transfer and reassembly of data is so quick, there is rarely any lag time.

Over the past decade, different industry standards bodies have developed various VoIP standards each for specific telephony environments. Enterprise IP telephony, carrier long distance, call center and computer telephony systems all require different features, integration capabilities, scalability, and expertise.

In 1996 the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T) began standardizing VoIP with the H.323 standard which defines the protocols to provide audio-visual communication sessions on any packet network. Then in 1999 another organisation, the Internet Society (ISOC) home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) – also a signaling protocol, widely used for setting up and tearing down multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over the Internet.

Other organizations which may also influence VoIP standards with a more regional or technology-specific focus include: the American National Standards Institute (ANSI); the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI); the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); and the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC). H.323 originated from a telephony and circuit switching perspective -hence better interoperability with public switched telephone network (PSTN) and SIP originated from the data and packet switching side (using session layers in the OSI model and the application layer in the TCP/IP model) has more flexibility to add new features and its relative ease of implementation and debugging, both are very similar but approach technical issues such as connection setup/disconnect in different ways. Both H.323 and SIP are improving themselves by learning from each other, and the differences between them are diminishing with each new version.

In summary, technology has come along way and still has as long way before it is perfected for multimedia. As cost of internet availability is getting cheaper and advertising companies resorting to online media, the demand for internet is increasing. Currently the main limitation of internet multimedia, IP technology is that both are dependent upon the high speed internet connections. Software developers have done well in utilizing different Codecs/compression ratios for video streaming, however having slow or congested connections will result in inferior video/voice quality. The two hosts must have high speed connections to get maximum speed which is then again dependent on the Ethernet evolution to provide high-speed networking standards.