Virtual set-top box in the cloud: Enabling interactive third party applications

The dramatic growth of mobile devices has led to a significant change in the TV industry. The trend to switch to the cloud is unstoppable, since it promises cost-savings and new ways of generating revenue. One big challenge is still to manage the virtualization of the full functionality of the set-top box in the cloud, so that it can be accessed from anywhere from any device. In this paper we present a platform-as-a-service media solution to addresses this challenge. The focus is to design and implement proper interfaces to enable interactive third-party applications to extend the capability of the virtual set-top box in the cloud. We validate the proposed APIs with some example applications and further discuss its theoretical and practical scalability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first concrete work to discuss the design and implementation issues of application interfaces for virtual set-top box in the cloud.