Personalized Electronic Program Guides for Digital TV

access to greater and greater amounts of electronic information, we are faced with significant problems when it comes to finding the right information at the right time—the essence of the information-overload problem. One of the proposed solutions to this problem is to develop technologies for automatically learning about the implicit and explicit preferences of individual users to customize and personalize the search for relevant information. In this article, we describe the development of the personalized television listings system (PTV),1 which tackles the information-overload problem associated with modern TV listings data by providing an Internet-based personalized TV listings service so that each registered user receives a daily TV guide that has been specially compiled to suit his/her particular viewing preferences.