'Shared Browsing' concept in FMS2

Hi All,

I'm currently working on a new concept called 'Shared Video Watching'
for Fabchannel. The idea is the following:

- Given the persons A, B, C  are registered users on Fabchannel.com
- Person A goes to Fabchannel.com and logs in
- Person A has Person B on his buddy list
- He sees Person B and Person C are online too
- He chooses a concert from the concert list and start watching his
favourite band
- Person B sees his buddy ( Person A ) is watching a cool concert
- Person B asks permission to his buddy to 'join' the concert
- Person A sees his budy asking permission and grants it
- They now can watch the concert together, Person A being 'the leader'
and Person B the follower. It means that if Person A decides to watch
another concert or seeks through the playing concert, Person B gets to
see every 'move'

In this use-case I've let out Person C, but you can imagine that he
can ask authorisation to Person A or B to 'join' too, the more the
merrier :-)

We're having some internal discussions how to implement all this:

IMPLEMENTATION A
I'm leaning towards implementing a Chat-like application where users
are kept synchronized by subscribing to a single SharedObject onSync
event handler and sending the seek and play events of Person A to this
SharedObject. Groups of 'buddies' watching together are simply using a
room/instance in the Chat application. Each person is connecting and
requesting it's own 'stream' on the server and the server acts as a
'dumb' stream server.

IMPLEMENTATION B
The other solution is to have the server publish a live stream called
"PersonA" when Person A requests a concert and then let Person B and C
and D and E connect to the same live stream ( "PersonA" ). Person A
never connects to the livestream but 'updates' the live stream when he
seeks or chooses another concert ( which is another FLV file stored on
the server ).

Now i've been going through the documentation and i read the Flashcomm
book (especially the part on publishing live streams,
SynchronizedEvents and ChatRooms, btw the SynchronizedEvents code is
supposed to be online but can't find it?) and i have some questions:

- Synchronisation is key in this concept, there has to be low latency
/ delay for this to work. Are there any 'gotchas' or 'don't forget to
look at this'? Given that there are usually a few hundred users
simultaneously on our site and we're using fairly large FLV files (
prerecorded, not live, minimum 700-800MB ) i reckon there might be
issues to watch out for
- Are there example applications/code/technotes that could be used as
a reference for this application?
- We have features that we like to implement after this demo (
recording of the whole 'shared browsing session', adding webcam/audio
features, deeplinking ), are they essential in the architecture for
this demo or can we postpone and revisit after this simplified demo?
- We're using a Edge(2)/Origin solution, does that give an advantage
over IMPLEMENTATION A over B or vice-verse and are there any special
configuration settings that are useful?

Sincerely,

--
Owen van Dijk
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