User-Configurable Personalized Mosaic Electronic Program Guide

Abstract

An electronic program guide (EPG) has been developed to help a viewer discover his preferred program more easily. Furthermore, more advanced and user-friendly EPG, mosaic EPG, emerged. It displays split screens simultaneously showing a variety of live broadcast programs and enables a viewer to easily select his preferred program. But this mosaic EPG screen is predetermined by broadcast providers. Therefore a viewer cannot configure a personalized mosaic EPG screen according to his interests. To overcome this disadvantage, we propose user-configurable mosaic EPG attainable on the set-top box of a viewer. We consider a set- top box equipped with two tuners, the one for displaying and the other for recording. This set-top box can record any selected program on the storage via the second tuner. If a viewer configures his favorite programs, the set-top box starts to record the programs one by one repeatedly for a predetermined time interval. A personalized mosaic EPG can be realized when these stored programs are put together. Because the stored programs will be updated continuously, a viewer can watch the almost live mosaic EPG screen configured according to his preference. The proposed method can provide a user-configurable personalized mosaic EPG without any assistance from broadcast providers.