Television schedule information transmission and utilization system and process

摘要

Television schedule information transmission and utilization systems (50A-50D) transmit TV schedule data and associated network control messages provided by computer (54) as packets via the Video Blanking Interval (VBI) lines in the TV signal from various television program providers (51). This data is acquired by regional data procssing systems and forwarded by the regional data processing systems to subscriber units (52) and used to construct an internal database. This internal database can be accessed by the subscriber unit (52) to display a TV schedule for the channels that are received by the user's TV.