Proceedings of the seventeenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
IEEE Internet Computing
On the performance of wide-area thin-client computing
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Connecting TV & PC: an in-situ field evaluation of an unified electronic program guide concept
Proceedings of the seventh european conference on European interactive television conference
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This paper proposes and evaluates a server centered approach to integrating personal content, residing in the user's home network, in the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) of digital broadcast television. With this approach, a server located outside the home of the user takes the integration work for its account, leaving the set-top-box to only handle the interaction with the user. We compare this approach to the situation in which the set-top-box executes the EPG. The benefits of the server centered approach are mainly simplification of the set-top-box leading to less maintenance, reduced energy consumption and lower cost while the functionality is boosted as it could connect in the same way to other services in-home and on the Internet. Another key benefit is that the central service can be easily upgraded without changing anything to the STB itself. We show that the overhead of sending the descriptions of the in-home content to the server is limited. The delay perceived by the user is limited to a typical value of 100 ms. The upstream bandwidth used for sending descriptions of in-home content to the integration server takes on average 100 Bytes per item, thanks to fairly simple compression techniques.