The present invention relates to a digital broadcast receiving apparatus that receives data on an electronic program guide (EPG) for explaining the contents of TV programs with at least character data and displaying the EPG and a method of displaying video data associated the TV programs in the EPG.
There are several known methods of displaying EPGs. One is to display only character data associated with TV programs. Another is to display program icons instead of character data so that even children who do not understand the character data can easily select TV programs. Still another is to display video data associated with TV programs which are often selected by a user so that he or she can easily discriminate his or her favorite TV programs from other programs in an EPG.
There are, however, several disadvantages to the EPG displaying methods described above.
A known method of displaying only character data associated with TV programs tends to have much character data to explain the contents of the TV programs, so that users cannot understand the contents easily. A known method of displaying program icons instead of character data could offer child-friendly EPGs which, however, has a limit to explain the contents with icons, so that adults may have a difficulty in understanding the icons. A known method of displaying video data associated with user-favorite TV programs just offers images in an EPG irrespective of the size of the EPG or characters displayed with the images, thus lowering viewability.
Moreover, video data has a larger amount of data than character data. Therefore, as the number of TV programs with which the video data is associated increases, the storage capacity of a memory that stores EPG data increases. In addition, when an EPG is scrolled, even though the EPG has no enough space for displaying video data and the video data cannot be displayed anymore after scrolled, the video data remains in the memory, which is a waste of memory.