An Efficient Channel Navigation Scheme based on Patterns of Watching TV Programs

With the emergence of digital TV broadcasting, various TV channels are provided to a TV audience. But it is getting hard for the audience to find his or her preferred TV programs due to the huge number of TV channels. In order to mitigate the difficulty, channel navigation schemes have been proposed. The schemes predict preferred TV channel from viewer's previous watching histories, and provide the predicted channels when the viewer wants to change TV channel. As channel navigation schemes, there are Most Recently Selected (MRS) scheme providing the most recently watched channel, and Most Frequently Selected (MFS) scheme providing the most frequently selected channel. However, MFS and MRS scheme could be inappropriate to current TV system broadcasting various TV programs in a channel because they are based on the viewer's patterns of watching TV channels. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient channel navigation scheme, Program Most Frequently Selected (PMFS), based on patterns of watching TV programs instead of TV channels. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme PMFS reduces the seek distance compared to the previous channel navigation schemes, MFS and MRS.