Mobile Social TV Interaction through Cloud Computing

Social TV makes watching TV an engaging rewarding experience. You can watch your favorite shows, comment on them, chat with your friends and do many more. The rapidly increasing power of personal mobile devices is providing much richer contents and social interactions to the users on the move. This trend however is suffocated by the limited battery lifetime of mobile devices and unstable wireless connectivity, making the highest possible quality of service experienced by mobile users not feasible. The recent cloud computing technology, with its rich resources to compensate for the limitations of mobile devices and connections, can potentially provide an ideal platform to support the desired mobile services. Tough challenges arise on how to effectively exploit cloud resources to facilitate mobile services, especially those with stringent interaction delay requirements. In this paper we will make interaction to mobile social TV through cloud. The system effectively utilizes both PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) cloud services to offer the living-room experience of video watching to a group of mobile users who can interact socially while sharing the video. Here we employ a surrogate for each user in the IaaS cloud for video downloading. The surrogate performs efficient stream transcoding that matches with the present connectivity quality of the mobile user.