Patent ID: 7503056

Claim:
An information processing apparatus, comprising: an acquisition unit operable to acquire first program guide information, the first program guide information including broadcasting time information of a program; a production unit operable to produce second program guide information from the first program guide information, the second program guide information including the broadcasting time information of the program for every time slot spanned by the program, the time slots being in lengths of an hour, 30 minutes or 15 minutes; an allocation unit operable to allocate the second program guide information as one or more clone EPG objects in a retrieval table for retrieval based upon the time slots spanned by the program, wherein each of the clone EPG objects is allocated to a single one of the time slots spanned by the program by directly copying the first program guide information of the program as the clone EPG objects and then setting each clone EPG object to a respective one of the time slots spanned by the program; and a retrieval unit employing a given one of the time slots as a search condition to set retrieval processing, the retrieval unit being operable to retrieve a respective one of the clone EPG objects for the second program guide information from the retrieval table using the given time slot as the search condition to identify the respective clone EPG object for the program; wherein a program table for displaying information of the program to a user is generated based on the respective clone EPG object.