Electronic program guides used to be an exclusive feature of high and model TV sets and set-top-boxes. However, with the continuous price drop of powerful microcontrollers these features are more and more also found in mid range items.
telos is looking back at many years of experience in developing and integrating EPG solutions for various platforms and standards.
Electronic program guides in this context are never stand-alone applications. The transmission of the data is always built on top of picture and sound transmission and the operation must be seamlessly integrated into an existing TV set or set-top-box user interface.
Unlike Teletext or other supplementary TV features, an EPG allows to control the behaviour of the whole system by for instance allowing the user to preselect the reception of a certain program from within the program guide.
This requires a deep understanding of the EPG technology as well as of all TV and STB-related system issues such as chassis design, controller limitations, memory restrictions, OSD consistency etc.
Another complex task when integrating EPG functionality into a mid range TV set is to optimise the performance of the software to get by with the rather low computing power of most microcontrollers in such consumer products. A full featured EPG allows the user to set sorting criteria and to interactively change the view of the displayed data. This needs to be done in acceptable speed while other essential features of the system are running concurrently.
telos can develop customized complete EPG solutions for you. In addition, we have the experience to integrate such solution into your existing environment, even if this environment does not contain the latest available microcontroller.
There is just one book on EPG: