Networked computer games, distributed virtual reality systems and shared whiteboard presentations are prominent examples of distributed interactive media - they allow a group of users to interact with the medium itself. This book investigates the distributed interactive media class in detail. Topics include: abstract media model, how to ensure consistency, an application-level protocol and how to develop reusable functionality such as support for late-comers and session-recording. The main intention of this book is to demonstrate that distinct distributed interactive media have many problems in common and to show how to solve these problems in a generic and reusable fashion for the whole media.

th We are very happy to present the proceedings of the 8 International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems IDMS 2001, in co-operation with ACM SIGCOMM and SIGMM. These proceedings contain the technical programme for IDMS 2001, held September 4 7, 2001 in Lancaster, UK. For the technical programme this year we received 48 research papers from both a- demic and industrial institutions all around the world. After the review process, 15 were accepted as full papers for publication, and a further 8 as short positional papers, intended to provoke debate. The technical programme was complimented by three invited papers: QoS for Multimedia What’s Going to Make It Pay? by Derek McAuley, E nabling the Internet to Provide Multimedia Services by Markus H- mann, and MPEG-21 Standard: Why an Open Multimedia Framework? by Fernando Pereira. The organisers are very grateful for the help they received to make IDMS 2001 a successful event. In particular, we would like to thank the PC for their first class - views of papers, particularly considering the tight reviewing deadlines this year. Also, we would like to acknowledge the support from Agilent, BTexact Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft Research, Orange, and Sony Electronics without whom IDMS 2001 would not have been such a memorable event. We hope that readers will find these proceedings helpful in their future research, and that IDMS will continue to be an active forum for the discussion of distributed mul- media research for years to come.

The first International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunication Services (IDMS) was organized by Prof. K. Rothermel and Prof. W. Effelsberg, and took place in Stuttgart in 1992. It had the form of a national forum for discussion on multimedia issues related to communications. The succeeding event was "attached" as a workshop to the German Computer Science Conference (GI Jahrestagung) in 1994 in Hamburg, organized by Prof. W. Lamersdorf. The chairs of the third IDMS, E. Moeller and B. Butscher, enhanced the event to become a very successful international meeting in Berlin in March 1996. This short overview on the first three IDMS events is taken from the preface of the IDMS’97 proceedings (published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1309), written by Ralf Steinmetz and Lars Wolf. Both, Ralf Steinmetz as general chair and Lars Wolf as program chair of IDMS’97, organized an excellent international IDMS in Darmstadt. Since 1998, IDMS has moved from Germany to other European cities to emphasize the international character it had gained in the previous years. IDMS’98 was organized in Oslo by Vera Goebel and Thomas Plagemann at UniK – Center for Technology at Kjeller, University of Oslo. Michel Diaz, Phillipe Owezarski, and Patrick Sénac successfully organized the sixth IDMS event, again outside Germany. IDMS'99 took place in Toulouse at ENSICA. IDMS 2000 continued the tradition and was hosted in Enschede, the Netherlands.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Multimedia Interactive Protocols and Systems, MIPS 2003, held in Napoli, Italy in November 2003. MIPS continues the form IDMS/PROMS Workshop series. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 130 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on wireless multimedia systems, communication protocols for multimedia, scheduling, caching, quality of service architectures, novel communication services, middleware, infrastructure, IP telephony, multimedia applications, and encoding.

"This book examines the current state of global media distribution today, including legacy and born-digital media industries, and the social, cultural, and economic impact of the digital distribution ecosystem"--

This book was written for students and practitioners of engineering and social sciences, including computer, information, communication, library, business, management, and cognitive science. The topic is the relationship between people and interactive media. The book describes individuals, groups, and organizations. An understanding of people is critical to an understanding of the technology which can help people. This book was written with the help of a special computer system for authoring called the Many Using and Creating Hypertext (MUCH) system. Students and researchers from the University of Liverpool contributed to the book through the MUCH system. Classes at the University of Liverpool, both undergraduate classes and master's degree classes, have used various drafts of this book as required reading. The book has been available to the students online via the MUCH system, and the students have provided helpful feedback for the contents of the book. The author is particularly grateful for the contributions of Antonios Michailidis and Alex Birchall. Antonios's influence is most prominent in the chapters on groups, and Alex's, in the latter chapters on organizations. Claude Ghaoui coordinated the book authoring and production team, and Anthony Deakin provided finishing touches.