User centric media in the future internet: trends and challenges

The evolution of the Internet is being leaded by two main threads, one driven by industry through the evolution of networking infrastructures and the other driven by producers of content either in a professional or non professional way. Moreover, due to the explosion of the World Wide Web (which has started as a document repository) and its successful descendants (Semantic Web and Web 2.0), along with the dramatic increase of net-based audiovisual material (networked media) that has been produced by professional and amateur users, Internet is rapidly transforming to a full fledged virtual environment that facilitates services, interaction and communication. Therefore the vision that the Future Internet will be an Internet of Media centered in the user as content consumer and creator is starting now to be a reality. In this context, a series of new technical and social Challenges are emerging in order to enable this vision to thoroughly become true. In this paper, we present some of these Challenges and trends as a result of previous discussions within the User Centric Media Cluster of EU projects on Networked Media.