Mobile and Interactive Social Television - A Virtual TV Room

Smart phones are becoming more and more powerful. Services that were traditionally designed for a static environment can now be implemented into mobile devices. One such service is Interactive Social TV, which allows geographically dispersed people to meet in a virtual shared space and watch TV while being able to interact with each other. This paper presents two novel architectures of a Mobile and Interactive Social TV system. In both of the architectures, the interaction is represented by a rich audio-visual media, allowing users to hear and see each other. In the first architecture, the mixing of the TV content with the interaction media is performed at the server side. In the second architecture, the mixing is performed in each client device. The issues of decoding and rendering simultaneous content and interaction media streams on a mobile device are discussed, and the related implementation is presented.