Synchronous MediaSharing: Social and Communal Media Consumption for Geographically Dispersed Users

Abstract

Real-time social interaction possibilities are increasingly dis- appearing 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 consist- ing of APIs plus a back-end that enables geographically sep- arated 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 un- derlying network infrastructure as well as the majority of its principal functional components have already been de- signed, implemented and evaluated. A chief innovation of the system is that its exclusive reliance on open web stan- dards warrants cross-platform support and unlocks seam- less 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 implemen- tation, present tentative practical results that con rm the feasibility and validity of our design, and overview the sMS feature roadmap. The sMS functionality has apparent util- ity in education, training and professional settings, but also in the eld of entertainment and the recreational market.