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Information about Electronic Program Guide

“EPG” redirects here. For other uses, see EPG (disambiguation).


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The Sky Digital EPG in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.
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.

History

In June of 1988 a patent was awarded to Eli Rider, Michael H. Zemering, and Frank Shannon. US Patent Number 4,751,578 patenting the implementation of an Electronic Program Guide. Shannon originally envisioned this concept and the conceptual design was created by Zemering with the backing of Rider. Mysteriously the attorney processing the patent, David P. Gordon, ended up having the patent assign to him and amassing a huge fortune along with Rider. Michael H. Zemering, and Frank Shannon never realized any compensation for the design. The 578 design is now in millions of set top boxes. Although several of the EPG ideas were being used no one had integrated all of the features in to one design. In 1988 it was estimated that it would have cost over $1000.00 per set top box. It was cost prohibitive to implement the system but it was feasible to make a prototype.

In 1953 a weekly national US-published entertainment news and television program listing magazine called TV Guide was launched. By 1985, a small independently-owned cable station called the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) was launched, providing a 24-hour on screen listing scroll with programming information for each given cable system.

In In 1988, Prevue Networks (the original creators of the electronic programme guide) notified most of the smaller cable companies that still carried the older version of the channel to replace their existing service 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 carried its own 24 hour on-screen program guide (which makes it easier for viewers that don't have access to the internet, a magazine subscription, or digital cable or satellite TV. The TV Guide Channel uses its own special satellite system similar to The Weather Channel's WeatherSTAR system, used to carry local weather forecast.

Present Day

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. Examples include IceTV and MythTV.

In Australia, the lack of a seven-day electronic program guide has neccessitated datacast channels such as Seven Guide, Nine Guide, Ten Guide and the defunct SBS Essential to provide program information.

For another example of an EPG system see Guide Plus+.

See also

External links

Digital EPGs

Analog EPGs


[ edit ] Video formats
Analog broadcast
525 lines: NTSC | NTSC-J | PAL-M
625 lines: PAL | PAL-N | PALplus | SECAM
Defunct systems: Pre-1940 | 405 lines | 819 lines | Baird-Nipkow | MAC | MUSE
Multichannel audio: BTSC (MTS) | NICAM-728 | Zweiton (A2, IGR)
Hidden signals: Captioning | Teletext | CGMS-A | GCR | PDC | VBI | VEIL | VITC | WSS | XDS
Digital broadcast
Interlaced: SDTV (480i, 576i) | HDTV (1080i)
Progressive: LDTV (240p, 288p, 1seg) | EDTV (480p, 576p) | HDTV (720p, 1080p)
Digital TV standards: MPEG-2: ATSC, DVB, ISDB | MPEG-4: SBTVD
Multichannel audio: AAC (5.1) | Musicam | PCM | LPCM
Hidden signals: Captioning | Teletext | (CPCM/Broadcast flag) | AFD | EPG
Digital cinema: UHDV (2540p, 4320p) | DCI | 22.2 audio
Technical issues: | MPEG transport | Standards conversion | Video processing | VOD
EPG may stand for:
  • Electrical penetration graph
  • Electronic program guide
  • Electropalatograph
  • Eggs per gram
  • Engin Principal du Génie ("Main Engineering Tank"), a French first line armoured engineering engine built on the chassis of the Leclerc tank.

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Within phonetics, a phone is:
  • a speech sound or gesture considered as a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language
  • a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties

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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1920s  1930s  1940s  - 1950s -  1960s  1970s  1980s
1950 1951 1952 - 1953 - 1954 1955 1956

Year 1953 (MCMLIII
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Motto
"In God We Trust"   (since 1956)
"E Pluribus Unum"   ("From Many, One"; Latin, traditional)
Anthem
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TV Guide is the name of two North American weekly magazines about television programming, one in the United States and one in Canada. Although the magazines share the same name and a similar logo, they are owned by different companies and publish distinct editorial content.
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20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1982 1983 1984 - 1985 - 1986 1987 1988

Year 1985 (MCMLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link displays 1985 Gregorian calendar).
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1985 1986 1987 - 1988 - 1989 1990 1991

Year 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII
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20th century - 21st century
1960s  1970s  1980s  - 1990s -  2000s  2010s  2020s
1996 1997 1998 - 1999 - 2000 2001 2002

Year 1999 (MCMXCIX
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TV Guide is the name of two North American weekly magazines about television programming, one in the United States and one in Canada. Although the magazines share the same name and a similar logo, they are owned by different companies and publish distinct editorial content.
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Availability
Satellite
DirecTV Channel 237
Dish Network Channel 117 TV Guide Network (formerly known as TV Guide Channel, Prevue Channel and Prevue Guide) is a cable network produced by Gemstar-TV Guide International in the United States.
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Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government
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Digital cable is a type of cable television distribution using digital video compression. The technology was developed by Motorola.

Uses

Digital cable is used by cable distributors to increase the variety of programming available on their networks, using video compression
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The of this article or section may be compromised by "weasel words".
You can help Wikipedia by removing weasel words. Satellite television is television delivered by way of communications satellites, as compared to conventional terrestrial television and cable television.
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The Weather Channel

Type Cable network (Weather/meteorology)
Country  United States
Availability    National; affiliated services available internationally
Slogan Bringing Weather to Life
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WeatherStar refers to the technology used by The Weather Channel (TWC) to generate their Local Forecast segments (currently known as Local on the 8s) on cable TV systems nationwide.
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Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and/or video signals which transmit programs to an audience. The audience may be the general public or a relatively large sub-audience, such as children or young adults.
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'Middleware is computer software that sits 'in the middle' between application software (e.g. a word processing program) and the operating system (Unix, Windows, z/OS etc.) It is similar to operating system software in that it provides functions to multiple applications, and it is
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A set-top box (STB) or set-top unit (STU) is a device that connects to a television and an external source of signal, turning the signal into content which is then displayed on the television screen.
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Digital television (DTV) is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound by means of digital signals, in contrast to analog signals used by analog (traditional) TV.
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Digital radio describes radio technologies which carry information as a digital signal. The topic covers both broadcasting by radio and two-way communications. The acronym DAB has been used to identify the generic technology of digital audio broadcasting, although now it has become
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The vertical blanking interval (VBI), also known as the vertical interval or VBLANK, is the time interval between the end of the last line of one frame or field of a raster display, and the beginning of the next.
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cable television into the house.]]

Cable television is a system of providing cocoy television to consumers via radio frequency signals transmitted to televisions through fixed optical fibers or coaxial cables as opposed to the over-the-air method used in traditional
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You can help Wikipedia by removing weasel words. Satellite television is television delivered by way of communications satellites, as compared to conventional terrestrial television and cable television.
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Cable radio or cable FM is a complementary concept to that of cable television, bringing radio transmissions into homes and businesses via coaxial cable. It is generally used as cable TV was in its early days when it was "community antenna television", to enhance the quality
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A satellite radio or subscription radio (SR) is a digital radio signal that is broadcast by a communications satellite, which covers a much wider geographical range than terrestrial radio signals.
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worldwide view of the subject.
Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page.
Radio broadcasting is an audio (sound) broadcasting service, traditionally broadcast through the air as radio waves (a form of electromagnetic radiation) from a
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television station is a type of broadcast station that broadcasts both audio and video to television receivers in a particular area. Traditionally, TV stations made their broadcasts by sending specially-encoded radio signals over the air, called terrestrial television.
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digital video recorder (DVR) or personal video recorder (PVR) is a device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive or other medium. The term includes stand-alone set-top boxes and software for personal computers which enables video capture and
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graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of user interface which allows people to interact with a computer and computer-controlled devices which employ graphical icons, visual indicators or special graphical elements called "widgets", along with text, labels or text
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Channel, in communications (sometimes called communications channel), refers to the used to convey information from a sender (or transmitter) to a receiver.

Overview

A Channel can take many forms.
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