Two-List Scheme with Personalized Electronic Program Guide for Fast IPTV Navigation

The adoption of the shift from one-way push-based traditional media broadcasting to an interactive pull-based Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service has seen significant growth in recent years due to the vast number of television (TV) channels and applications it provides. Despite the increase in the deployment of the IPTV systems around the world, channel switching a major functionality in every TV system needs further improvement. Zapping delay in IPTV, a delay that occurs during channel switching brings a major setback to the IPTV system, especially when compared with the traditional television services. A new fast channel navigation framework in IPTV was proposed in achieving a drastic zapping delay reduction during channel switching. Instead of analyzing thebehavior of channels, switching and predicting channels based on behavior analysis, the proposed approach will enable subscribers to choose their favorite channels from a different genre, into the hot and cold channel list, where hot channels are channels regularly viewed by the subscriber and cold channels are channels not viewed by subscribers. This approach saves subscribers a painstaking amount of time in searching for the desired channel to watch. This will be effective in reducing zapping delay when compared with several state-of-the-art approaches.