Definition

• Medium / Media - a material enabling a process of interest or undergoing a process itself.
• Art - materials and techniques used to create and communicate the work of art.
• Communication - the physical, intellectual, and social environment related to communicating the information.
• In our case - a combination of forms of expression and digital storage.
• Multimedia - the combination of different media to convey information in an integrated package.

Classification

• Print media, communications delivered via paper.
• Electronic media, communications delivered via electronic or electromechanical energy.
• Interactive media, that allows the user to control what elements are delivered, how, and when.
• Hypermedia, when it contains a structure of links that the user can navigate.
• Published media, any media made available to the public.
• Mass media, all means of mass communication:

  Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass electronic communication networks

  News media, mass media focused on communicating news

Multimedia Distribution

• A multimedia project can be:

  presented on stage

  transmitted or broadcast

  available online

  projected or played locally

• A multimedia project can be

  linear, with a single thread from the beginning to the end

  nonlinear, where the storyline can branch in several possible direction depending on the choices of the user - best example is the interactive multimedia

Multimedia Storage and Players

• The storage devices can be either digital or analog.
• Analog - information storage using continuous values.
• Digital - information stored using an encoding with a finite set of values, most often binary.
• Digital storage: CD-ROM, DVD, digital video tapes, flash drives, floppy discs.
• Analog storage: photograph, tape (audio cassette, VHS), vinyl records, laser discs.

Online Multimedia

• Multimedia content on web pages.
• A web page often combines at least text, images, and links, and sometimes sound.
• The web itself can be seen as a giant hypertext.
• Interactive content can be added using JavaScript, PHP, CGI scripts, etc.
• Streamed media: media that is being played while it is being downloaded to the user's computer.

Use of Multimedia

• Arts and entertainment
• Design
• Industry and engineering
• Business
• Education
• Scientific research