Multimedia Document Synchronization in a Distributed Social Context

Watching digital content together and commenting on it is becoming a social habit between friends and family members living apart. It is also becoming an important value-added activity for business video conferencing. In both cases, the video sharing experience can easily be spoiled if synchronization problems arise, since the context of the conversation will not be consistent across locations. In the past, research has treated the distributed synchronization problem as a technical one, mainly focusing on timestamps, frame accuracy, and protocol-dependent control messages. That approach is based on a content agnostic approach which we feel does not adequately address the higher-level constraints of individual conversations. In this paper we postulate that the technical issues are just part of the problem, so solutions need to take into account the media being shared and the social setting. Therefore, we propose a framework that allows researchers to experiment with different synchronization policies tailored to specific settings. The framework allows the evaluation of these policies through user testing, for finding the most appropriate policies and strategies.