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Top1. Introduction
The Internet has been established as the basic infrastructure for delivering video in a variety of mediated communication applications. There is a wide range of services available today, that carry voice, data, and video traffic in real time, to users located at remote areas. Both, live-broadcasting (LB) and offline /video on demand (VoD) streaming services are involved in mediated communication, which is encountered in a variety of application fields, such as journalism in the new media environment, social media and embedded digital characters, cultural shows and multimedia heritage portals, news reporting and infotainment services, cross- and trans-media publishing, audiovisual production and collaborative creative projects in the forms of web documentaries, hypermedia authoring and/or other nonlinear storytelling (Avdelidis et al., 2002;Dimoulas, Veglis & Kalliris, 2014a;2015;Dimoulas, Kalliris, Chatzara, Tsipas & Papanikolaou, 2014b; Matsiola, Dimoulas, Veglis & Kalliris, 2014;Vegiris,Avdelidis, Dimoulas & Papanikolaou, 2008;Veglis, Dimoulas & Kalliris, 2014). Furthermore, distance learning programs constitute a continuously emerging and at the same time demanding mediated communication example, which is very useful in providing information perception and understanding insights, thus in evaluating overall communication efficiency (Kalliris, Dimoulas, Veglis & Matsiola, 2011; Kalliris, Matsiola, Dimoulas & Veglis, 2014;Kotsakis, Dimoulas, Kalliris & Veglis, 2014). Participants to distance learning programs have at their disposal a variety of tools and services that allow them to communicate with their educator and with their peers in asynchronous and synchronous ways. In the latter category of services, real time video broadcasting as well as attending a real time course are the services that most resemble the traditional face to face educational process and are being highly valued by the participants in a distance learning course. Thus, the successful broadcasting of audiovisual content to learners plays an important role in the educational process (Kalliris et al., 2011;2014;Kotsakis et al., 2014).