Playout management subsumes those lower as well as higher level system tasks necessary to execute stored multimedia presentations. An elegant way to handle the data management tasks especially for simultaneous multimedia presentations is to use a database management system. Based on an analysis of some alternative solutions for providing a playout management service for multimedia presentations which data are managed by using a database management system, we propose to integrate a playout management service directly into the database management system. This allows for very efficient solutions since the storage, retrieval, buffering, and playout of the multimedia data is handled within one consistent system. The playout management as well as other services of the database management system, such as, e.g., a continuous object management service, can work more optimal by reflecting the specific operation of each other. By introducing the AMOS system which is a distributed, object-oriented multimedia database management system, we show a concrete example for the realization of an integrated playout management service. We also briefly describe an extension toward reactive adaptive playout management aiming on high quality multimedia presentations in spite of contradictory external and system-internal constraints.

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