A personalized IPTV channel-recommendation mechanism based on the MapReduce framework

Internet protocol television viewers spend considerable time browsing through the many existing channels, which is inefficient and time consuming. Although the recommendation system can solve the channel-switching problem, its performance is slow unless it is adapted to read a large amount of data sets. This study proposes a novel cloud-assisted channel-recommendation system under a cloud computing environment, channel association rules (CARs), to speed up the performance of channel switching, thereby help users to find their favorite channels in less time. The CARs algorithm is compared with the conventional (COV) solution and the most frequently selected (MFS) algorithm based on MovieLens data sets. The experimental results indicate that the predictive accuracy of CARs is superior to that of the COV and MFS algorithms. In addition, CARs use parallel computing in MapReduce to distribute large amounts of user history logs across multiple computers for processing. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can be employed to efficiently handle big data in a finite time when a huge of cloud servers are rented from commercial cloud providers such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft HDinsight.