An Automatic Personal TV Scheduler based on HMM for Intelligent Broadcasting Services

In the future television broadcasting a flood of information from various sources will not always be welcomed by everyone. The need of accessing specific information as required is becoming a necessity. We are interested to make the life of television consumer easier by providing an intelligent television set which can adaptively proposed certain shows to the viewer based on the user historical consumed shows. The TV watching history data consists of TV program titles with their respective genres, channels, watched times and durations, etc. The method proposed is by utilizing Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to model the user preference of kind of genres the viewer will watch based on recorded genres of several weeks time. We take watching schedule from 6 PM to midnight as boundary. The range thus divided into 3 independent time band of 2 hours each resulting in 3 time bands from 6 PM to 8 PM, 8 PM to 10 PM, and lastly 10 PM to midnight. Each time band will be represented by an HMM. From each HMM we can generate a sequence of predicted genre that the user will probably watch during corresponding time-band. Our approach assumes that the user shows a consistent behavior of watching pattern in week to week basis and during the moment of watching TV. To asses the method performance experiment is conducted using real data collected from December 2002 to May 2003. Some user's data are selected and based on that predictions are made. The resulting predictions are then compared with the actual user's history. The experiment shows satisfactory result for user with middle to high consistent behavior level.