By Jim Brown, Buckeye Cablesystem And Carol Ansley, Scott Shupe, ARRIS Group
For a long time CATV customers have had the infamous grid guide with its slowly rolling sequence to contend with if they wanted to know what was playing. Gradually as more intelligent settop boxes became available, the grid guide became scrollable.
Recently, more advanced electronic program guides and menus have begun spreading through the operators’ networks as well as newer device architectures that allow several devices to work together. This paper studies the behavior of users working with newer system architectures and more advanced user guides, and compares it to users of older standalone devices with traditional grid guides. This behavior can inform future network system design that has to consider the expectation for channel change time and relevant use cases.