Masking Effect of Out-of-sync News Content with Different Distractors

The major aim of this paper consists of detecting possible masking effects across different media types in a realistic scenario. For this purpose, we presented out-of-sync news clips containing no, one or several additional content elements such as a speaker only or a narrator complemented by a picture, a video, a ticker, background music or noise, to several evaluators. Similar to several previous studies it has been noticed that out-of-sync errors are perceived much earlier when audio presentation precedes video. Furthermore, it has been observed that users prefer simple formats, i.e., a news speaker only, as long as the synchronization errors are low enough not to be noticed consciously. As soon as the time difference between the playback of visual and audible streams starts to be perceivable the viewers can be distracted by using a large number of different content elements. Using one distraction element only is not sufficient to produce a masking effect.