Electronic Program Guide (EPG) information provides a valuable service to viewers. It allows them to know what is currently playing and what will be playing in the future so they won’t miss their favorite programs. In addition, in some markets EPG is a requirement, including Full Power stations in the United States and soon to be all stations in Mexico. If you are a single station broadcaster, EPG using the D2Mux is very easy. The D2Guide feature of the D2Mux allows you to enter schedules manually or automated using a subscription service such as TitanTV. The D2Guide will then parse the schedules to create the EPG tables which will be inserted into the transport stream by the D2Mux. This is all done in a single unit, no external PC/equipment is needed as in other solutions.

But what happens if you are a broadcaster with multiple stations? How do you distribute your EPG data efficiently and in a cost effective manner? The simplest way is to have a D2Mux with the D2Guide feature at the uplink which will then distribute the EPG data to all sites. Only one unit is needed. This works great if you are only retransmitting locally at each downlink and do not need to decode the programs for transcoding or to add local origination content.  Once you decode the satellite broadcast all EPG data is lost and you will not be able to use a single uplink solution.

If you need to decode your satellite broadcast at each location, one method for adding EPG information is to treat each site as a single station with its own D2Mux with D2Guide option. This method will work fine in most cases and is a great solution when all sites do not carry the same programming and have different EPG data. However, it does need someone to manually upload the schedules at each location or internet access to automatically pull the schedules. What if some of your sites are remote with no internet access and hard to get to, especially during winter months. There is also the added cost of the D2Guide for each location.  For these situations D2D Technologies now has a better solution, the new D2Propel feature of the D2Mux.

The D2Propel feature has a lower cost than the D2Guide and will allow the D2Mux to extract the EPG data from the satellite broadcast before decoding for local origination and then add the EPG data back to the transport stream after re-encoding. The satellite broadcast from the receiver is sent to the ASI 1 input of the D2Mux where the D2Propel software extracts the EPG data before sending it out the ASI 1 output to the local origination equipment. Once the program is decoded, local content added, and re-encoded it is sent to the ASI2 input of the D2Mux where the D2Propel software will insert the extracted EPG data before sending it out ASI2 output to the transmitter.

The D2Mux with D2Propel software is by far the most automated and cost effective EPG distribution solution in the broadcasting industry. Please contact D2D Technologies at 844-D2D-TECH or sales@d2dtechnologies.com to see how easy and low cost it is to distribute your EPG information.