As multimedia systems deal with a variety of temporally interrelated media items, synchronization is an important issue in those systems. One part of synchronization is the representation of temporal information. In contrast to traditional computing tasks, multimedia imposes new requirements on the representation of time. Specifically, a fine-grained and a flexible temporal model is required. Therefore, a number of temporal models have been suggested by various authors. This paper evaluates and classifies a selection of the most common existing models applying fundamental statements of the time theory and temporal logic. Learning from the deficits of the existing models, a new temporal model based on interval operators is proposed for multimedia systems.