Evaluation of Technological Solutions and Requirements for Cloud TV Services Based on Decision Support Systems

Cloud TV will play an important role in future pay TV services and is quickly becoming the next arena for TV content providers. This emphasizes the need for a technology roadmap to address several key issues that may affect the deployment of future Cloud TV services. Three alternative technologies, Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), Over the Top (OTT), and Smart TV have been investigated. The methodology used is the analytic hierarchy process based on a decision support system developed for this study. The current work implements and verifies a transparent road mapping model for Cloud TV solutions. The results indicate that OTT seems to be the most efficient and valuable choice and reveal an important blend of social, economic, technological requirements to be taken into account when deploying and/or adopting Cloud TV services from a pay TV operator. Sensitivity analysis is performed to investigate the stability of the results and the accuracy of the approach. The findings will be an important guide for the development of Cloud TV solutions and the improvement of those already deployed.