To provide rich media services, multimedia computing has emerged as a technique to generate, edit, process, and search media contents, such as images, video, audio, graphics, and so on. Typical types of cloud-based services include: IaaS, NaaS, PaaS, IPMaaS, DaaS, and SaaS. In the same manner, future networks meet cloud via Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking (SDN). Prosumers’ potential for hosting, delivering and interacting with Media Events requires a rich pool of resources and also a flexible set of provisions and guarantees upon users’ request. Towards this direction, Cloud Computing arises as a promising solution, being able to reserve assets on demand and guarantee their provisions over time. Existing resource reservation techniques are based either on a “fixed” model, so that to accommodate the anticipated peak demand but with low resource utilization during non-peak times, or on a “pay-as-you-go” model, where the cost is estimated for the total amount of information transferred, but subject to variation due to contention from other applications in the Cloud Data Center.

Decoupling hardware and software through virtualization is the most important reason for content providers to shift towards the cloud. The applications can be available always on, low in cost, on demand, massively scalable and pay as you grow among users with heterogeneous capabilities and characteristics. This will be accomplished through the design and development of an abstraction entity that is responsible to manage the media resources and the network capabilities, acting as a mediator between the client application and the media-aware cloud. The content can be processed to meet the device capabilities and the backhaul network bandwidth by aggregating requests from the end-users.

To address all the above technical issues in cloud-based media computing, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, the MCL Director, Professor Weisi Lin of Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and Professor Tasos Dagiuklas of Hellenic Open University (Greece) are organizing a “Cloud-based Media” Workshop in IEEE ICME 2015, Torino, Italy, June 20-July 3, 2015. The paper submission deadline is March 30, 2015.