Multimed Tools Appl (2014) 70:977–1005 DOI 10.1007/s11042-012-1100-6 Building mobile multimedia services: a hybrid cloud computing approach Dejan Kovachev · Yiwei Cao · Ralf Klamma Published online: 3 May 2012 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 Abstract Mobile multimedia services are in high demand, but their development comes at high costs. The emergent computing paradigm cloud computing has great potential to embrace these issues. In fact, we are at the early stage of the coa- lescence of cloud computing, mobile multimedia and the Web. Motivated by the tremendous success story of the Web based on its simplicity principles, we argue for a comprehensive review on current practices of web and mobile multimedia cloud computing techniques for avoiding frictions. We draw on experience from the development of advanced collaborative multimedia web applications utilizing mul- timedia metadata standards like MPEG-7 and real-time communication protocols like XMPP. We propose our i5CLoud, a hybrid cloud architecture, which serves as a substrate for scalable and fast time-to-market mobile multimedia services. This paper demonstrates the applicability of emerging cloud computing concepts for mobile multimedia. Keywords Mobile multimedia · Cloud computing · Multimedia metadata · XMPP 1 Introduction The widespread use of smartphones and other mobile devices contributes to un- precedented sharing of mobile multimedia on social networking sites like Facebook or streaming on web sites like YouTube. Additionally, web and mobile multimedia converge, as the mobile networks become an integral part of the Internet. D. Kovachev (B ) · Y. Cao · R. Klamma RWTH Aachen University, Ahornstr. 55, 52056, Aachen, Germany e-mail: kovachev@dbis.rwth-aachen.de Y. Cao e-mail: cao@dbis.rwth-aachen.de R. Klamma e-mail: klamma@dbis.rwth-aachen.de