ELECTRONIC PROGRAM GUIDE

An 'Electronic Program(me) Guide' ('EPG') or also an 'Interactive Program(me) Guide' ('IPG') or 'Electronic Service Guide' ('ESG'), is an on-screen guide to scheduled broadcast television programs, allowing a viewer to navigate, select, and discover content by time, title, channel, genre, etc, by use of their remote control, a keyboard or even a phone keypad.

Contents

History

Today's technology

Intellectual property rights

See also

External links

Digital EPGs

Analog EPGs

History

In 1953, during the golden age of television, a weekly nationally (in the US) published entertainment news and television program listing magazine called TV Guide was launched. It wasn't until 1981 that a small independently owned cable station called the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) was launched. The EPG station was a 24 hour cable station in the United States that was carried in only a few cable systems. The EPG displays a continuous on-screen program listing scroll to tell viewers what's on any of the cable TV stations which the cable company carries.
In 1993, Prevue Networks (the one that created the original EPG and the Prevue Guide) notified most of the smaller cable companies that still carried the older EPG version to replace their existing EPG version with the updated Prevue Channel version. Then, in 1999, TV Guide and the Prevue Channel agreed to merge and became what is now the TV Guide Channel. Today, the TV Guide Channel carries its own 24 hour on-screen program guide (which makes it easier for viewers that don't have access to the internet or have digital cable or satellite TV or even have a subscription to their magazine. The TV Guide Channel uses its own special satellite transporter area receiver that's similar to The Weather Channel's WeatherSTAR systems that carry the local weather forecast.

Today's technology

Although completely different from the on-screen program scroll on the TV Guide Channel in the United States, the technology is based upon broadcasting data to an application usually residing within middleware in a set-top box which connects to the television set and enables the application to be displayed. The technology is predominant in the digital television and radio world, but equally EPGs exist that rely upon analogue technology (using the vertical blanking interval). These signals may arrive via cable TV, satellite TV, cable radio, satellite radio, or via over-the-air terrestrial broadcast radio and television stations.
By navigating through an EPG on a receiving device, users can see more information about the current program and about future programs. When EPGs are connected to PVRs, or personal video recorders they enable a viewer to plan his or her viewing and record broadcast programs to a hard disk for later viewing.
Typical elements of an EPG comprise a graphical user interface which enable the display of program titles, descriptive information such as a synopsis, actors, directors, year of production, and so on, the channel name and the programs on offer from subchannels such as pay-per-view and VOD or video-on-demand services, program start times, genres and other descriptive metadata. The information is typically displayed on a grid with the option to select more information on each program. Radio EPGs offer more text-based displays of programme name, programme Description, genre, on-air or off air, Series. artist, album and track title information.
An EPG allows the viewer to browse program summaries, search by genre or channel, immediate access to the selected program, reminders, and parental control functions. If the device is capable of it, an EPG can enable one-touch recording of programs, as some DirecTV IRDs can do with a VCR using an attached infrared emitter (which emulates a remote control).
The latest revolution in EPGs is a personalised EPG which uses semantics to be able to advise one or multiple viewers what to watch based on their interests. iFanzy is such an EPG that is completely personal. It allows users to use or create custom skins (like a personal computer's desktop image) and knows what they like to see. It also records these programs so that the viewer no longer has to depend on a broadcaster's time schedule but watch a programme at the moment of choice.
EPGs are typically sent within the broadcast transport stream or alongside it in a special data channel. The ATSC standard for DTV uses tables sent in each station's PSIP, for example. These tables are meant to contain the program start time and title, and additional program descriptive "metadata". In the U.S., these devices receive time signals from local PBS members, so that they can record on time. Most systems, however, rely upon third party "metadata aggregators" (companies such as Tribune TV Data, Gemstar-TV Guide in the U.S. and Europe and Broadcasting Dataservices in Europe), to provide good quality data content. Newer media centres (PC based multi-channel TV recorders) and Digital Video Recorders may use an internet feed for the EPG. This enables two-way interactivity for the user so that media download can be requested via the EPG, or related link, and remote programming of the media centre can be achieved. An example is IceTV or MythTV.
For another example of an EPG system see Guide Plus+.

Intellectual property rights

The EPG system is protected under US patent law and the current license fee is $9 per device paid by the manufacturers who employ an EPG in their products. See Guide Plus for more information.

See also

★ NexTView

External links

Digital EPGs

★ TVTV.co.uk

★ Tea Vui Huang's DVB-H ESG Simulator - Simulates Modeo, Nokia N92 & Sagem myMobileTV DVB-H handsets

★ TV-Browser - Open Source EPG software

★ OpenTV ZUI EPG Television Electronic Program Guide from OpenTV using ZUI.

★ Unique Interactive Electronic Program Guide creation and management for Digital Radio and TV.

★ WebShifter Electronic Program Guide for TV recording software.

Analog EPGs

★ Broadcasting Dataservices

★ Sourceforge/NextView Info