Abstract
Currently, the media consumption paradigm
is changing from a single end user to a group
shared experience. Now, social communication
opportunities may be exploited (e.g., conferencing
while watching television), facing lots of
technological (e.g., synchronization, universal
session handling, scalability) and perceptual
(e.g., presence awareness, QoE) challenges. This
article focuses on one of these major challenges
ahead in new emerging social interactive multimedia
applications, which is the synchronization
of different media streams across multiple locations,
known as inter-destination multimedia
synchronization (IDMS). We describe the three
kinds of temporal multimedia synchronization,
and summarize some related work and examples
of applications in which IDMS is needed. The
article includes a discussion about an RTP/
RTCP-based IDMS solution the authors have
been working on, as well as the standardization
status regarding this kind of synchronization.