Seamless user-generated content sharing in the extended home

Abstract

User generated content, captured with handheld and mobile devices, is constantly increasing both in terms of quantity and quality, as modern devices have become very affordable and easy to use. At the same time, wide availability of Internet connectivity, either via broadband home PC connections or directly from mobile devices, made it possible to share the captured content with the loved ones, those being family, friends, or even unknown people with common interests.

Based on the human social need for experience sharing, many on-line services, applications and technologies were built to allow photo, video and audio sharing among users of all capabilities. However, this growth of user content sharing has increased the volume of media and diversity of tools, which in turn leads to usability and content repository fragmentation hindrances. Users have their content stored at multiple locations, such as the home, which is the primary place for storing and archiving, online sharing services and mobile devices. Moreover, their sharing habits are usually limited or dictated by the sharing tools and services they use and in many cases they are forced to use multiple solutions for their given use cases.

This thesis studies user-generated content sharing, mainly in the form of snapshot media, in the Internet (i.e. on-line services), mobile and home domains, presenting the main architectures and protocols. Special attention is paid at the home domain as the networked home is expected to play an important role in the years to come, by considering spatial and functional extensions, leading to what is called ”Extended Home”. This could enable new ways of content sharing, without the need of uploading the content to 3rd party services and sites. Thus, emphasis is put on the concept of ”remote access” to home networks, which is a key enabler. The author suggests that content sharing can be abstracted so that devices and applications could function independently of the actual protocols and bearers used, introducing the concept of seamless content sharing.

Seamless content sharing encompasses the abstraction of different content repositories and sharing methods, such as sharing directly from the home, via on-line services, or with devices in proximity, so that the user does not need to deal with technical details, access bearers or sharing protocol selection. Rather, users should be able, in a ”user-centric” manner to just select the person that they want to share content with and let the system automatically choose the best possible method and technology, in a transparent manner. Moreover, the author presents novel architectures for content sharing in nomadic and extended home environments, even going beyond sharing of multimedia content, towards any kind of user-generated content to not only users but also external, semi-trusted, services.