synchronous MediaSharing: social and communal media consumption for geographically dispersed users

  • Authors:

  • Maarten Wijnants;Jeroen Dierckx;Peter Quax;Wim Lamotte

  • Affiliations:

  • Hasselt University, Wetenschapspark, Diepenbeek, Belgium;Hasselt University, Wetenschapspark, Diepenbeek, Belgium;Hasselt University, Wetenschapspark, Diepenbeek, Belgium;Hasselt University, Wetenschapspark, Diepenbeek, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd Multimedia Systems Conference
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Real-time social interaction possibilities are increasingly disappearing from the media consumption process. A decisive contributing factor to this tendency is growing user location disparity. This paper proposes synchronous MediaSharing (sMS), a distributed, purely web-based framework consisting of APIs plus a back-end that enables geographically separated persons to socially consume multimedia content in a synchronized fashion. The sMS service currently resides in a proof-of-concept stage, awaiting qualitative evaluation by means of user experience research methods, yet its underlying network infrastructure as well as the majority of its principal functional components have already been designed, implemented and evaluated. A chief innovation of the system is that its exclusive reliance on open web standards warrants cross-platform support and unlocks seamless content synchronization across the physical and virtual worlds. We outline our vision for the sMS service, motivate the need for such a system, discuss its current implementation, present tentative practical results that confirm the feasibility and validity of our design, and overview the sMS feature roadmap. The sMS functionality has apparent utility in education, training and professional settings, but also in the field of entertainment and the recreational market.