A generic, personalized electronic program guide system for accessing multiple online TV providers

Abstract

Television viewing is changing with a growing trend towards online consumption of content and a proliferation of providers. This is now starting to bring into question the future of the traditional television channel as the program itself becomes more dominant. However, this, in turn, poses a problem for the viewer in that it will become increasingly difficult to locate those programs of interest across such a broad range of providers. While broadcasters and content providers currently offer an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) to allow viewers to browse through their offerings, these are limited in scope. This is warranting an EPG that can truly work across all online providers. This paper introduces a new architecture for EPGs that has been developed to meet this challenge. A key feature of this architecture is the way in which it can access content from multiple providers and be personalized depending on viewer's preferences and interests, viewing device, internet connection speed and their social network interactions. The results that have been included shows that the system is able to communicate with different content sources and recommend a list of programs that match the user viewing pattern and their friends' recommendations within the social networks.