Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for LiveShift Application

LiveShift is a peer-to-peer video streaming application developed by the CSG group at the University of Zurich. The application, developed in Java, supports both live streaming and video-on-demand in an integrated manner. While video is transmitted through the peer-to-peer network in a live fashion, all peers participate in a distributed storage. This adds the ability to replay time-shifted streams from other peers in a distributed and scalable manner.

LiveShift has, currently, only a simple user interface, in which users can select a channel and optional timeshift date/time to watch. This, however, is not an ideal way to do it, since users are forced to use an external information source (e.g. a web page) to know what each channel was broadcasting at a specific time. Moreover, the system does not suggest content based on user interest.

This work has the objective of improving LiveShift Graphical User Interface (GUI), by adding an Electronic Program Guide for users to choose what they want to watch. The system can also relate peers interest in order to suggest new programs and catch user attention.

The work involves reading of related literature (mostly scientific papers) and deciding on the specific tasks that will be carried on. The proposed solution must be designed and implemented in the LiveShift software. A final evaluation of results is very important, in order to verify the success of the proposed approach.