Patent ID: 7519982

Claim:
A method for providing program data, comprising: broadcasting from a head-end less than the total number of available interactive program guide (IPG) pages, each IPG page being transmitted as an encoded video stream having a respective packet identifier (PID); receiving, by the head-end from a terminal, a request message for a requested IPG page, the requested IPG page not being one of the transmitted IPG pages; encoding, by the head-end, only a guide portion of the requested IPG page using a temporal slice persistence encoding scheme, the requested IPG page including the guide portion and a background portion; assigning, by the head-end, a particular packet identifier (PID) to the encoded guide portion; and in response to the request message demand-casting, by the head-end to the terminal, only the encoded guide portion a limited number of times in a non-continual manner.