Inter-Destination Multimedia Synchronization; Schemes, Use Cases and Standardization

Traditionally, the media consumption model has been a passive and isolated activity. However, the advent of media streaming technologies, interactive social applications, and synchronous communications, as well as the convergence between these three developments, point to an evolution towards dynamic shared media experiences. In this new model, geographically distributed groups of consumers, independently of their location and the nature of their end-devices, can be immersed in a common virtual networked environment in which they can share multimedia services, interact and collaborate in real-time within the context of simultaneous media content consumption. In most of these multimedia services and applications, apart from the well-known intra and inter-stream synchronization techniques that are important inside the consumers playout devices, also the synchronization of the playout processes between several distributed receivers, known as multipoint, group or Inter-destination multimedia synchronization (IDMS), becomes essential. Due to the increasing popularity of social networking, this type of multimedia synchronization has gained in popularity in recent years. Although Social TV is perhaps the most prominent use case in which IDMS is useful, in this paper we present up to 19 use cases for IDMS, each one having its own synchronization requirements. Different approaches used in the (recent) past by researchers to achieve IDMS are described and compared. As further proof of the significance of IDMS nowadays, relevant organizations (such as ETSI TISPAN and IETF AVTCORE Group) efforts on IDMS standardization (in which authors have been and are participating actively), defining architectures and protocols, are summarized.This work has been financed, partially, by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV), under its R&D Support Program in PAID-05-11-002-331 Project and in PAID-01-10, and by TNO, under its Future Internet Use Research & Innovation Program. The authors also want to thank Kevin Gross for providing some of the use cases included in Sect. 1.2.Montagud, M.; Boronat Segui, F.; Stokking, H.; Van Brandenburg, R. (2012). Inter-Destination Multimedia Synchronization; Schemes, Use Cases and Standardization. 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Multimedia Teleservices Modelled with the OSI Application Layer Structure

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On the use of adaptive media playout for inter-destination synchronization

[EN] Inter-Destination Multimedia Synchronization (IDMS) is essential in most of the emerging social multimedia applications. In this paper we present a novel Adaptive Media Playout (AMP) scheme that aims to acquire an overall synchronization status between distributed receivers by means of smoothly adjusting their playout timing. Simulation results show that the proposed solution minimizes long-term playout discontinuities (skips and/or pauses) which are subjectively more annoying to users than small variations in the media playout rate.This work was supported by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV), under its R&D Support Program in the PAID-01-10 Project, and by Generalitat Valenciana, under its R&D Support Program in the GV 2010/009 Project.Montagud, M.; Boronat, F. (2011). On the use of adaptive media playout for inter-destination synchronization. IEEE Communications Letters. 15(9):863-865. https://doi.org/10.1109/LCOMM.2011.061611.110072S86386515

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