In this paper, we describe the design of a novel mobile social
TV system, CloudMoV, which can effectively utilize the
cloud computing paradigm to offer a living-room experience of
video watching to disparate mobile users with spontaneous social
interactions. In CloudMoV, mobile users can import a live
or on-demand video to watch from any video streaming site,
invite their friends to watch the video concurrently, and chat
with their friends while enjoying the video. It therefore blends
viewing experience and social awareness among friends on the
go. As opposed to traditional TV watching, mobile social TV is
well suited to today’s life style, where family and friends may
be separated geographically but hope to share a co-viewing experience.
While social TV enabled by set-top boxes over the
traditional TV systems is already available [4], [5], it remains a
challenge to achieve mobile social TV, where the concurrently
viewing experience with friends is enabled on mobile devices.