Broadcasting and Processing of Program Guides for Digital TV

Abstract

From the consumer's point of view, the transition from analog to digital TV comes in two flavors: 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 nonhierarchical presentation of program information are unlikely to be used any longer in service and program event selection; instead, electronic program guides (EPGs) will provide an interactive user interface offering comfortable and fast program browsing functions. Unlike in the computer world, the desired schedule information will virtually be served from a local random access database, and it will mostly be fetched from the current transmission. Caching techniques will be applied; however, they are 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 digital video broadcasting (DVB) standard for service information (SI) and an example EPG, this paper will analyze SI transmission schemes and SI caching and processing strategies. Typical hardware and software constraints of consumer set-top boxes (STBs) are taken into account.