ii Design, Development and Evaluation of an Adaptive and Standardized RTP/RTCP-based IDMS Solution iii ABSTRACT Nowadays, we are witnessing a transition from physical togetherness towards networked togetherness around media content. Novel forms of shared media experiences are gaining momentum, allowing geographically distributed users to concurrently consume the same media content while socially interacting (e.g., via text, audio or video chat). Relevant use cases are, for example, Social TV,

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... tworked games and multi-party conferencing. However, realizing enjoyable shared media services faces many challenges. In particular, a key technological enabler is the concurrent synchronization of the media playout across multiple locations, which is known as Inter-Destination Multimedia Synchronization (IDMS). This PhD thesis presents an inter-operable, adaptive and accurate IDMS solution, based on extending the capabilities of RTP/RTCP standard protocols (RFC 3550). Concretely, two new RTCP messages for IDMS have been defined to carry out the necessary information to achieve IDMS. Such RTCP extensions have been standardized within the IETF, in RFC 7272. In addition, novel standard-compliant Early Event-Driven (EED) RTCP feedback reporting mechanisms have been also designed to enhance the performance in terms of interactivity, flexibility, dynamism and accuracy when performing IDMS. Design, Development and Evaluation of an Adaptive and Standardized RTP/RTCP-based IDMS Solution ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS