METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR FINDING AND SELECTING A DESIRED DATA ITEM FROM A LARGE SCHEDULE OF DATA ITEMS USING A TV SET AND A CONTROLLER SIMILAR TO A TV-REMOTE-CONTROL

摘要

An apparatus and method for presenting a viewer with an overallrepresentation of the present number of entertainment programs available for selectiongiven one week of program schedule data for 300 or more channels and one or morefiltering criteria to limit the number of items represented in the overall representation.Sequentially applied filters will filter the group of program schedule data items thathas at least 100,000 half hour time slots offered by 300 channels each week into asmaller subgroup where individual consideration of each item of the subgroup can bemade in a reasonable time. A set top box drives the display of overall representationsor results of filtering criteria on a commercial TV set. Once a reasonable sizedsubgroup is obtained, other displays provide specific information of the programofferings of the subgroup. Selection of the filtering criteria and selection from withina subgroup is interactively made by a viewer through the use of a controller that looksand operates very much like a TV remote control. This makes the interaction familiar,easy and predictable.