Paradigm shift in IPTV service generation: Comparison between locally- and Cloud-rendered IPTV UI

This paper introduces a novel and fundamental change in the creation and delivery of media services like IP Television (IPTV) through the idea of the so-called virtual SetTop Box (vSTB). By shifting most of the service execution environment - e.g. the Web browser - to a Cloud infrastructure, the vSTB concept addresses certain limitations of current IPTV deployments. Nevertheless, routing UI delivery out of the Cloud causes a significant impact on the network infrastructure, which might have some implications for IPTV system response and can therefore result in a lower Quality of Experience overall. This paper describes this approach and its current implementation, as well as identifying and addressing network challenges that emerged in a corresponding project in the Telekom Innovation Laboratories. Furthermore, this paper provides a comparison between IPTV service executed locally on an end-user device (locally-rendered IPTV UI), and that delivered to an end-user after it was executed within the cloud (Cloud-rendered IPTV UI) and empirically shows the feasibility of the presented vSTB Approach.