Presentation services for stored multimedia presentations which are not based on guaranteed operating system and network services face the problem that, while realizing a presentation, the actual system performance can become temporarily insufficient for an unpredictable period of time. This can have different kinds of effects for the multimedia presentation ranging from not noticeable presentation deficiencies up to disastrous ones like, e.g., the interruption of a presentation in a non-recoverable state. By introducing itself proper presentation deficiencies accepted by the individual user to lower the required performance profile, an active multimedia presentation service in many cases can endure such periods of time. When system performance is not critical anymore, these deficiencies must be compensated. However, this requires a highly flexible and well differentiated underlying scheme. In this paper, we propose such a flexible scheme for receiver-controlled multimedia presentation services specialized for distributed architectures. It is partitioned into three phases, the detection phase detecting parameter mismatches, the reaction preparation phase selecting an optimal adaptation or compensation strategy, and the schedule generation and interpretation phase which computes and interprets a concrete adaptation or compensation schedule.

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