Patent ID: 7707608

Claim:
A method for communication for an interactive information delivery system, comprising: supporting, at a headend, an interactive program guide (IPG) comprising a plurality of IPG pages, each IPG page being defined with a plurality of regions; partitioning, by a transport stream generator at a headend, a plurality of the IPG pages into a plurality of regions including guide, video, icon and program description regions; determining IPG pages to be first provided to a terminal; separately encoding each partitioned region of the IPG pages to be first provided to the terminal using slice-based encoding; separately transmitting, from the transport stream generator, each encoded region of the IPG pages to be first provided to the terminal toward a terminal, each of the transmitted regions being adapted for assembly into a respective IPG page by the terminal; receiving a demand-cast request message including a region identifier to identify at least one region of an IPG page to be provided next to the terminal; and transmitting, to the terminal, the at least one region of the IPG page identified by the region identifier for updating only regions of the IPG page at the terminal associated with the region identifier.