| 摘要 |
Service providers generally seek to provide more channels and/or services over increasingly limited communication pathways, e.g., cable, Internet, etc. To do so, compression techniques may be used to compress transmissions. For example, a digital signal carried by a cable television cable may include multiple channels, each including a compressed video stream, such as an Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) data stream. While such compression facilitates maximizing usage of available bandwidth, a drawback to compression is that locking on to a new channel requires some portion of a channel to be collected before the channel can be presented. This collection takes time, and introduces a noticeable delay or "lag time" between selecting a new channel, and the new channel being presented. To help avoid a delay, various embodiments of the invention concern predictively buffering channels so that a request to change to a buffered channel results in an immediate presentation of buffered data.
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