SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR BROADCASTING INFORMATION IN A TELEVISION DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

摘要

A national level information service system (10) collects local and national interest information and advertisements from a plurality of remote providers (12) that may be located around the country or the world, and distributes this information to one or more television distribution systems (14) for viewing by the system viewers. The system provides timely information relating to various areas of interest, including, for example, news, sports, weather, stock information and the like, that can be viewed on one or more television channels. Providers (12) of the national and local interest information periodically collect the raw data containing the information to be broadcast, and store the data at a designated location, preferably on the provider's Internet server (18). These stored files are then periodically retrieved and compared to previously retrieved files to determine whether they have been updated by the information provider (12). Any updated files are sent to a central server (24) that provides information data storage for a plurality of channels, each of which is assigned to a particular information provider. The central server (24) periodically checks to see if new data has arrived for any of the channels, and if so, the data is formatted into script pages (e.g., HTML) that are suitable for display and sends the script pages to one or more local television distribution systems (14) for broadcast to the system viewers.