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Top1. Introduction
Enjoying their second decade of existence, maturing cloud-computing technologies have reformed the expectations and capabilities of the Information-Technology (IT) industry expected to play a crucial role in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) era (Gubbi et al., 2013). In a ΙοΤ world with billion connected devices, the classic distribution networks are migrating in a broadband environment through the cloud-computing services. The broadcasters and the communication operators, who want to offer video services, are faced with a daunting task: ensuring the live and on-demand video on any device. The operators that want to capitalize this change need a complete TV platform based on cloud-computing that drastically reduces the time-to-market and increases the revenues.
Cloud-TV (CTV) is a software platform that virtually depicts the functionality of a STB (Set-Top-Box) (Dawi et al., 2016), allowing pay-TV (Xiao et al., 2007) operators and other video service providers to bring advanced user’s features for online videos, such as YouTube and Hulu. CTV is implemented on existing cable TV, next-generation of cable TV sets, Internet-Protocol-Television (IPTV) decoders (Nielsen & Fletcher, 2020) and any other connected consumer electronics. TV service providers already have the experience of modern TV content, but flexibility, cost reduction and high-quality services are crucial needs to be captured in future TV services. Flexibility is an issue of paramount importance for modern television content providers to convert the TV content to Live-TV, Video-On-Demand (VOD), Catch-up, or Social Networking, offering the best possible quality (Noam, 2014). CTV is the technology that offers cloud-based TV products and facilities in any client equipment that is connected to Internet even this is a legacy STB or an Over-The-Top (OTT) TV device. OTT is a media distribution practice that allows a streaming content provider to distribute TV content, and other media services directly to the consumer over the internet via streaming media as a standalone product based on unmanaged (public) network without a dedicate STB but only a media player box (e.g android box) (Hutchins et al., 2019; Keating, 2018).
In the context of technological evolution from content ingestion to delivering end-user’s content and service enrichment, CTV offers an effective transition for pay-TV operators who want to invest in the TV industry without much risk. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the cloud-based TV services, offered by cloud vendors, explore the key requirements that may affect the deployment/adoption of CTV services from a pay-TV operator and evaluate three alternative technological solutions for CTV, namely IPTV, OTT and Smart-TV (Gerdsri et al., 2007). Smart-TV is a technological convergence between computers and flat screen TV sets and STB. Besides the traditional functions of TV sets and STB provided through traditional broadcasting media, new Smart-TV models provide Internet TV, online interactive media, OTT, as well as on-demand streaming media and home networking access (Ghiglieri et al., 2017; Boztas et al., 2015). Smart-TV is called the fourth screen coming up with PC, Pad and smartphone. With high market penetration, good configuration and network features, Smart-TV provides a broader platform for VOD applications without the need of using STB and is based on unmanaged (public) network. IPTV is a service that provides TV programming and other video content using the TCP/IP protocol as opposed to traditional cable/satellite signals (Karimi et al., 2018). An IPTV service, typically distributed by a service provider, delivers Live-TV programs or on-demand video content through managed (private) network. An IPTV system with a dedicate STB is used to provide video content over a private network in an enterprise, although such implementations are far less common than subscriber-based models due to complexity and scaling issues. Except from IPTV, the other two technologies give the opportunity to the clients to select any telecom provider for Internet connection (Aggarwal et al., 2011).