Distributed Media Synchronization for Shared Video Watching: Issues, Challenges, and Examples

Current societal changes are transforming the way people retrieve, annotate, and share media. While in the past users gathered together around media content, this has become an exception rather than the norm. As demonstrated by the popularity of social networking and personal communication tools, people expect the development of novel technologies that help them connect with others (e.g., by tagging images of a friend from high school). One key challenge in this respect is to support synchronous communication between people separated in space. This chapter focuses exactly on that, technologies and infrastructures for supporting social interactions between people while apart. In particular, it discusses the synchronization aspects of distributed media consumption (TV, YouTube videos, games, photo albums). As part of the quality of experience (QoE), synchronization is a key requirement for ensuring consistency of the media experience across locations. Starting with an overview of the research problem, the contribution of this chapter is to detail current and envisioned architectures for achieving what is commonly known as Inter-Destination Media Synchronization (IDMS), a topic drawing the attention of academy and industry alike.