Abstract—Television viewing is changing with a growing trend towards online consumption of content with a proliferation of providers and an increasing range of viewing devices available. This trend will start to challenge the future of the traditional television channel as more and more viewers becoming focused on the programs, rather than the broadcaster or provider who distributes them. However, this in turn poses a problem for the viewer in that it will become increasingly difficult to locate those programs of interest across such a broad range of providers. This paper introduces a new architecture for a generic cloud based Electronic Program Guide (EPG) that can access all of the available content sources. The architecture of the generic EPG system allows for program metadata to be retrieved from online providers in a single search operation despite the difference in metadata formats that are supported by the different providers. Moreover, this system provides a personalized EPG that takes the program as its core focus and outputs a list of recommendations that are based on the viewer’s interests, viewing pattern and the recommendations of their friends from within the social networks they belong to. Additionally, the system responds to the dynamic environment features such as viewing device, network bandwidth, and service registrations to ensure that any recommended program can indeed be watched by the viewer at that particular time.

Index Terms—Online TV, personalized electronic program guide, social networks, recommendation system.

The authors are with School of Computing, Science and Engineering, University of Salford, Manchester, United Kingdom (email: e.a.almohammed@edu.salford.ac.uk).

Cite: Emad Al-Mohammed, Nigel Linge, "Cloud Based Electronic Program Guide System with Integrated Social Network Recommendations," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 100-110, 2017.