KR100840570B1 - Method for using extra virtual channel in a digital broadcast system - Google Patents

Abstract

The present invention relates to a lease channel utilization technology in a digital broadcasting system, and extracts a program stream (PS), time information (STT), and virtual channel (VCT) information from a transport stream received from a digital broadcasting transmission system. Filters program data not to be pre-decoded in the stream, calculates a running time of the filtered information, displays the program data preset during the running time by connecting the leased channel among virtual channels at a time when the filtered information is to be broadcast, When the running time ends, the lease channel is disconnected and the unfiltered program data is displayed. According to the present invention, when a digital broadcasting system is viewed, a broadcast subscriber manually edits a broadcast channel to receive and view the broadcast channel itself, thereby displaying a broadcast program desired by the broadcast subscriber, thereby realizing user-oriented broadcasting to efficiently use display time. In addition, by providing and providing additional contents for the broadcaster's point of view, it is possible to explore other revenue sources.

ATSC, extra VTC, STT,

Description

How to use rental channel in digital broadcasting system {METHOD FOR USING EXTRA VIRTUAL CHANNEL IN A DIGITAL BROADCAST SYSTEM}

1 is a block diagram schematically showing the structure of a broadcast receiving system according to an embodiment of the present invention;

2 is a diagram illustrating a genre code category of a program broadcasted according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention;

3 is a flowchart illustrating an operation procedure for watching specific broadcast data according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

The present invention relates to a broadcasting technology in digital broadcasting, and in particular, leases in a digital broadcasting system suitable for utilizing an extra virtual channel (hereinafter referred to as VC) in digital broadcasting using the Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) method. It relates to a channel usage method.

Currently, terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB), such as terrestrial DMB, is provided free of charge. Therefore, it plays only a role of receiving and displaying broadcasts transmitted from broadcasting stations in the wired / wireless digital devices. Therefore, terrestrial DMB broadcasting is in the red because no other broadcasting revenue is generated. Of course, since most other broadcast types are in this way, broadcasters who receive direct advertising costs do not have much difficulty in maintaining their business, but broadcasters who do not find a revenue source do not provide better content separately.

In addition, when a consumer selects a channel, all the additional information, for example, an advertisement and the like are passively received and consumed, thereby spending a lot of time on an advertisement or content that they do not want to see.

As described above, in the conventional broadcast viewing, although there is a right to select a broadcast channel, there is a problem in that it consumes a lot of time since no method for editing the broadcast channel itself is provided.

The present invention is to overcome the limitations of the prior art described above, and an object thereof is to provide a method of using a rental channel in a digital broadcasting system that can utilize a rental channel in a digital broadcasting system.

Another object of the present invention is to provide a digital broadcasting system for viewing advertisement information other than broadcasting to be viewed in a digital broadcasting system, information to be viewed at a drop time, moving pictures, favorite advertisements, and local publicity advertisements. It is to provide a rental channel use method.

According to an aspect of the present invention, a process of extracting a program stream (PS), time information (STT), and virtual channel (VCT) information from a transport stream received from a digital broadcasting transmission system, and not decoding in advance in the program stream Filtering program data; calculating a running time of the filtered information; and displaying program data connected to a lease channel of the virtual channel, which is preset during the running time, at a time when the filtered information is to be broadcast. And when the running time ends, releasing the lease channel connection and displaying unfiltered program data.

Hereinafter, the operating principle of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the following description of the present invention, when it is determined that a detailed description of a known function or configuration may unnecessarily obscure the subject matter of the present invention, the detailed description thereof will be omitted. Terms to be described later are terms defined in consideration of functions in the present invention, and may be changed according to intentions or customs of users or operators. Therefore, the definition should be made based on the contents throughout the specification.

The present invention is to view additional information at a time other than the broadcast stream to be viewed using a virtual channel in a digital broadcasting system.

In other words, you can watch various information, communication lectures, English video or favorite advertisements or local promotional advertisements at times other than the broadcast you want to watch on the fixed channel. Of course, this is a method of utilizing a time other than the broadcast stream to be watched, so that it can be set in advance so that the user can watch without further operation.

Specifically, the present invention is a method of giving a user edit of such a broadcast channel. The characteristics of digital broadcasting can be known through a parsed descriptor in the process of processing the contents of a broadcasting stream or all other data.

It is determined whether specific data is downloaded from the stream by using the descriptor. If a descriptor setting part not to receive specific data appears, the newly decoded data is displayed by using a preset channel (extra VC in ATSC) part. The newly decoded data may include English courses, videos or texts for reading, and local broadcasts or advertisements of local broadcasters.

In addition, the number of leased channels for displaying newly decoded data can be expanded to not only one but also up to 30. Therefore, if only contents and facilities for using the channel are supplied, a wide range of services can be provided.

1 is a block diagram briefly illustrating a structure of a broadcast receiving system according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

Referring to FIG. 1, as shown in FIG. 1, a broadcast receiving system includes a tuner 102, a signal processor 104 processing a broadcast signal received from the tuner 102, and a signal processor 104. And a display unit 106 for displaying the broadcast signal processed by the controller, a memory 110 for storing channel information and data information, an input unit 112 for setting a user, and a controller 108 for controlling them. Here, the broadcast receiving system may be a digital broadcast set-top box, a cable television and a digital terrestrial television (or digital TV) for receiving a digital broadcast signal in the form of a bit stream on a packet basis.

The antenna receives a broadcast signal of a radio frequency (RF) channel. The tuner 102 tunes an RF channel when the automatic tuning command is applied to the broadcast signal received through the antenna. The signal processor 104 typically includes a demultiplexer for demultiplexing a digital stream transmitted from a channel selected through the tuner 102 into video / audio / additional / channel information, and program information demultiplexed by the demultiplexer. Parsing unit for analyzing the image processing unit, and an image processing unit for image processing (decoding) the demultiplexed video information.

In addition, the signal processor 104 extracts a PSIP (Program Service Information Protocol) through signal processing of an input transport stream (hereinafter referred to as TS). In this case, the PSIP provides major and minor channel numbers, video / audio stream information, and program detailed information of the current program, and is composed of four tables.

That is, MGT (System Time Table) constituting system time information, RRT (Rating Region Table) constituting rating information for each region, and MGT (PID information) of PID information of EIT (Event Information Table) constituting detailed information of each program Master GuideTable) and VCT (Virtual Channel Table) that configures information (number of channels, video / audio PID, etc.) about the actual digital channels in the RF channel. Therefore, analyzing the VCT can identify the channel number appearing on the screen.

In addition, the input unit 112 sets whether a user views a specific broadcast or advertisement. The controller 108 controls the overall system and calculates a running time from the STT value transmitted from the signal processor 104 so that the user can watch the program set by the user.

Specifically, the feature of digital broadcasting is that the signal processor 104 can determine what is being transmitted. That is, as shown in FIG. 2, since the genre code category for each program representing the code packing of the stream to be transmitted is shown on the TS, if the signal processing unit 104 recognizes this, the content of the received broadcast program is described. You can determine if it contains. Therefore, it is determined whether or not to be viewed according to the program information, and if the user wants to broadcast (bypass) to pass to the display unit 106, and if you do not want to advertise or want to reject the advertisement at all to filter.

In addition, since the signal processing unit 104 can grasp the time information of each program from the control unit 108 receiving the STT of the PSIP extracted from the TS, the signal processing unit 104 parses the STT to calculate the running time. Here, the STT value received by the control unit 108 is a table having time and date information of a program stream in the TS, and when the stream is received, the STT information is first identified to calculate a running time of a broadcast program and an advertisement. This determines how long a ready program should run.

During this time, the preset channels are connected among the channels VC (Virtual channel) 70-99. Here VC is divided into major and minor channels. Major channels have 2 ~ 99 channels, and 2 ~ 69 use the same number as the physical channel, that is, the same as the physical channel band, and the remaining 70 ~ 99 major channels are flexible as rental logical channels. to be. The use of the leased logical channel has an advantage that it can be used for any physical channel because it is a channel number independent of the physical channel number.

In addition, minor channel 0 is dedicated to NTSC, 1 to 99 are dedicated video and audio channels, and 100 to 999 can be used as data broadcasts that do not include video.

Thereafter, the controller 108 requests the controller 108 to transfer the ready program data stored in the memory 100 to the controller 108 in a random or set order, and displays the received ready data for a running time.

In this case, the ready data may bring a program stored in advance on the memory 110, but may download and display data received from the tuner 102 in real time. However, it is important to accurately calculate the STT information so that an error does not occur when switching between different channel bandwidths of the tuner 102.

3 is a flowchart illustrating an operation procedure for watching specific broadcast data according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

Referring to FIG. 3, in step 302, the broadcast transmission system sets up a lease channel, selects a program to be broadcast in step 304, and transmits a TS including broadcast data and broadcast information to the broadcast receiver in step 306. In step 308, the broadcast receiver receives the TS from the tuner 102, and in step 310, the signal processor 104 performs signal processing on the TS. However, when the user inputs a setting command through the input unit 112 and transmits the signal to the signal processing unit 104 before the step 310, the user's preference program and the unwanted advertisement program are recognized to receive the program stream. This can be determined.

In operation 312, the signal processor 104 displays the decoded signal on the screen. In operation 314, if other advertisement information other than the advertisement that the user wants to watch is included in the stream during the signal processing, the controller processes the information on the information. In step 316, the controller 108 connects the leased channel in step 316, and in step 318, the contents of the leased channel are displayed during a predetermined display time, that is, a running time of other advertisement information. In this case, the content is requested on the memory 110 or provided by performing a real-time download through the receiving system. Thereafter, if the advertisement is not finished in step 322, the process returns to step 318. If the advertisement is finished, the flow proceeds to step 324 to release the lease channel connection. Thereafter, in step 326, program display is performed.

As described above, the present invention controls and views additional information other than the broadcast stream to be viewed using the VTC in the digital broadcasting system using the ATSC method.

Meanwhile, in the detailed description of the present invention, a specific embodiment using ATSC digital broadcasting has been described. However, if an extra broadcast channel can be used without departing from the scope of the present invention, it may be used in terrestrial DMB. Of course, it can be used in digital broadcasting using. Therefore, the scope of the present invention should not be limited to the described embodiments, but should be defined not only by the scope of the following claims, but also by those equivalent to the scope of the claims.

In the present invention operating as described in detail above, the effects obtained by the representative ones of the disclosed inventions will be briefly described as follows.

According to the present invention, when a digital broadcasting system is viewed, a broadcast subscriber manually edits the broadcast channel to receive and view the broadcast channel itself, thereby displaying a broadcast program desired by the broadcast subscriber, thereby realizing user-oriented broadcasting to efficiently use display time. By providing and providing additional contents for the broadcaster's point of view, it is possible to explore other revenue sources.

Claims (3)

Extracting program stream (PS), time information (STT), and virtual channel (VCT) information from the transport stream received from the digital broadcasting transmission system; Filtering program data not to be decoded in advance in the program stream; Calculating a running time of the filtered information; Displaying the program data connected to the leased channel among the virtual channels during the running time at the time when the filtered information is to be broadcast; When the running time ends, disconnecting the rental channel and displaying unfiltered program data. Rental channel usage method in a digital broadcasting system comprising a. The method of claim 1, The filtering process, And setting a code of a stream not to be decoded in advance, and extracting a program and an advertisement corresponding to a code of the stream not to be decoded when the program stream is received. The method of claim 1, The preset program data, Method of using a leased channel in a digital broadcasting system, characterized in that the program stream to request data stored in the memory, or receive in real time.

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