An approach for controlling synchronous remote instances of a multimedia presentation

The enjoyment of sharing experiences with remote family and friends about TV shows and other multimedia content depends on how synchronized the users' contents are. Many works propose architectures and algorithms to provide continuous media synchronization to enhance the quality of shared media consumption. However, in some applications, such as interactive multimedia presentations, the content synchronization depends on many factors such as, for instance, user interactions. In these applications, in order to provide a synchronous shared experience, the interactions of one user should not affect only his presentation, but the presentation of all remote users which are engaged in the same activity. In this paper, we propose an approach for engaging remote users in synchronous shared experiences to interactive multimedia presentations. Our approach is based on replicating the interactions of one specific user in all remote presentation instances to keep the presentations synchronized. This means that one master user acts like a pilot that controls not only his local presentation but also the presentations of all remote users. We present some challenges that need to be overcome to implement this approach and, for each challenge, we list some possible solutions and their pros and cons. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation for NCL Documents and illustrate its use with highly-interactive multi-video presentations.