The objective of joint rate control is to achieve a better and more uniform picture quality by exploiting the complexity of each program. In this paper, a novel joint rate control scheme is presented for real time coding of multiple video programs. In our scheme, the total available channel bandwidth is firstly assigned to each program in proportion to its information content. A novel control scheme, which is adaptive to the variation of distributed bandwidth, is then presented in our design to determine quantization parameters and the number of skipping frames for each program. As a result, the proposed scheme can be considered as a "look current" scheme, which outperforms many existing ones in terms of coding complexity and video quality.