Follow Me: Personalized IPTV Channel Switching Guide

Compared with the traditional television services, Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) can provide far more TV channels to end users. However, it may also make users feel confused even painful to find channels of their interests from a large number of them. In this paper, using a large IPTV trace, we analyze user channel-switching behaviors to understand when, why and how they switch channels. Based on user behavior analysis, we develop several base and fusion recommender systems that generate in real-time a short list of channels for users to consider whenever they want to switch channels. Evaluation on the IPTV trace demonstrates that our recommender systems can achieve up to 45 percent hit ratio with only three candidate channels. Our recommender systems only need access to user channel watching sequences, and can be easily adopted by IPTV systems with low data and computation overheads.