Web application virtualization for IPTV

The convergence of the web and TV has already begun. Connecting TV with the web offers tremendous opportunities for commerce, entertainment, and social networking. However, web applications are too heavy for legacy IPTV set-top boxes (STBs) since legacy STBs have low computing power and small memory. In this paper, we propose web application virtualization for legacy STBs. In this architecture, web applications are running remotely on the cloud platform, and the visual output is streamed to the STBs. We present the virtualization architecture and issues for future developments.