Electronic Programme Guide for IPTV System

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) provides TV services to users through the infrastructure of an IP network. That means, you can watch television if you have IP orientated device which can connect to the provider’s network. Recently, the set-top-box (STB) has been used to receive IPTV services from providers such as Virgin Media. This is different from Internet TV which does not provide any the Quality of Service guarantees for TV programmes, has no geographical limitation and is widely popular (Yim, Lee, Lee, & Jeon, 2014).

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Recently, the propagation of IPTV has been led many researchers to more investigate and develop the performance and quality of service that offered to the users of the IPTV system. In the same way as for digital TV, it has become quite difficult for users to find the programmes that they are interested in due to the increase in available TV programmes and channel providers. Therefore, it has similarly, become necessary to support IPTV with the development of EPGs to help users find their preferred programmes.

An approach proposed by Concolato generates an EPG in a separate device different from the rendering device. It can serve IPTV and Terrestrial TV users, where the server received at first the programme metadata through the broadcasted channels and transformed the raw metadata into a presentation data. Then this presentation data is driven from the server to the EPG generating device. The generating device converts the received data into a presentation format which is streamed to the rendering device. This system provides the EPG to the user device as a client, therefore, the user device does not need to analyse the metadata itself. Moreover, it is possible to update the EPG presentation and change the look of the EPG when the user decides. However, this design has some disadvantages in that it requires more processing on the server side, the adaptation of the presentation with the terminal characteristics of different rendering devices is difficult, the user cannot control the displayed programmes to show a specified category or keyword and finally because the metadata is transformed into the presentation style, the transmission of the EPG requires high bandwidth (Concolato, 2009).

Another IPTV EPG system has been produced by Macedo to collect web data relevant to the programmes that are listed in the EPG. Firstly, the system classifies the programmes in the EPG into specified categories. Then the system integrates the gathered data with the information provided by the programme providers. The web data is gathered from several Internet sources and it contains textual information about the programmes that are listed in the EPG such as related news articles. The system extracts these news articles from a set of predetermined sources. This enriches the information that the EPG provides to users and helps them to make better decisions about whether they would like to watch a given programme or not (Macedo, Cardoso, & Pinto, 2014).

An EPG system proposed by Tan is based on an exchange of information between IPTV users to share their experiences and list of preferred programmes. The system consists of an EPG recommender engine, information exchange module, message module and filter

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module. The EPG recommender engine is responsible for recommending programmes to the users based on their profiles and preferred programmes. Then, in order to improve the user experience and provide more choices, the information exchange module is designed to send requests to the other users through the message module. The message module is responsible for sending requests to the other users, receiving their responses and parsing them to specify the users that should be provided with the shared EPG. The information exchange module supports several ways to exchange EPG information. The user can choose not to exchange their EPG information which means that they will lose the system benefits. Alternatively, they can choose only to exchange their programme information with some of their friends by sending requests to specified users. Finally, they can share programme information with all users in a totally unrestricted manner. The shared programmes are then forwarded to the filter module to filter out the programmes that already exist in the user’s own EPG (Tan, Zhu, Wang, & Chang, 2009).

The open IPTV system is another contribution that allows users to choose an EPG from multiple EPGs which belongs to a number of network providers. This system depends on giving the user the ability to access other IPTV service providers which together create what is called a ‘neighboured garden’. The open IPTV strategy allows users to change to another EPG which belongs to a different IPTV provider. Users do however, need to register with at least one default service provider who then provides the primary contact, bill management, security, other service connection and login records management services. However, service providers seem not to prefer the open IPTV platform (T. Kim, Kim, & Hahn, 2010).

An Internet television’s programme guide system has been proposed by Boyer which integrates electronic mail (e-mail) services. This system allows users to order and receive e-mail message reminders of selected television programmes and events. Moreover, the user can control when and how the reminders are generated and received, adding new programmes to the list and canceling previous reminders. Additionally, the user can select the type of reminders for free to view programmes or pay-per-view depending on the selected channels (Frankin E Boyer, Demers, & Blackwell, 2014). In the same field of research, McKissick developed an interactive television programme guide service which allows the service providers to deliver television programme listing information to the user’s local set-top-box. Using this service, the user receives notifications about the

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programmes that are outside the current display time frame. The user can then specify the type of notifications related either to the programmes or the time of broadcasting. The EPG offers the ability to manage the notification through listing, adding, canceling and changing type of notifications. Moreover, the EPG can provide any available information about the user’s selected programmes even those programmes that are not in the TV channels’ time schedule (as example a movie in cinematic release). Figure 2.2 shows the notifications that are provided to the user based on previously selected programmes (McKissick & Forrer, 2013).

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