A variety of multimedia and video services have been proposed and investigated, including services such as video-on-demand, distance learning, home shopping, and telecommuting. These services tend to rely on high-datarate communications and most have a corresponding need for a large amount of storage with high data rates and short access times. For some services, it has been predicted that the cost of storage will be significant compared to the cost of switching and transmission in a broadband network. This paper discusses architectures of a variety of multimedia and video services, with an emphasis on the relationship between technological considerations of the storage heirarchy to support these services and service architectures.
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