Patent ID: 7224837

Claim:
A method for concurrently transmitting a plurality of informational programs over a single digital transport stream to at least one receiver; the transport stream has a given rate of transmission and each receiver is operative to decode the transport stream into displayable video images corresponding to a selected program, the video images being structured as periodic frames, there being defined a delay period as the maximal period of time over which data in the transport stream decodable into any one complete frame, for any selectable program, must arrive; the method comprises processing that includes the steps of: i) scheduling a plurality of informational programs to be transmitted concurrently; ii) rendering, compressing and encoding each of the scheduled programs to obtain a corresponding digital video stream; iii) multiplexing all of said digital video streams, to form a first transport stream; each step being controlled interdependently among the informational programs; wherein said special processing is such that the video images corresponding to any selected informational video program that are displayable by any of said receivers when decoding said first transport stream are of essentially similar appearance to images displayable by the receiver if decoding a second transport stream, formed by otherwise processing said selected informational video program alone; and wherein if the plurality of informational programs were otherwise scheduled, rendered, compressed and encoded so that the resulting data be decodable by any receiver into corresponding video images of acceptable quality, there could be a number of instances in each of which the sum total of said resulting data that is required for decoding into one complete frame of displayable video image for each of said otherwise scheduled programs would substantially exceed the amount of data transmittable as a transport stream at the given rate of transmission over one delay period.