Broadcasting and Processing of Program Guides for Digital TV

From the consumer s point of view the transition from analog to digital TV comes in two flavours, quantity and quality. First, the number of services increases significantly and second, there are new service types to come. Paper TV-guides with their linear and non-hierarchical presentation of program information are unlikely to assist any longer in service- and program event selection. Instead, Electronic Program Guides will provide an interactive user interface offering comfortable and fast program browsing functions. — Unlike in the computer world, the desired schedule information will just virtually be served from a local random access data base, but will mostly be fetched from the current transmission. Caching techniques will be applied, which are, however, restricted due to the lack of sufficient local storage media. This makes the development of transmission, processing and buffering strategies a difficult task, bearing in mind that users expect fast and random access, whereas the service provider wants to keep the transmission bandwidth allocated for this type of data as small as possible. — Starting with an outline of the DVB Standard for Service Information and an example EPG, this paper will analyse SI transmission schemes and SI caching and processing strategies. Typical hard- and software constraints of consumer Set Top Boxes are taken into account.

Published

1996-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Digital TV, Service Information, Electronic Program Guide

DOI

10.5594/M00123

ISBN

978-1-61482-925-6