Patent ID: 7487530

Claim:
An apparatus for ranking broadcast programs accompanied with auxiliary program information, comprising: first means for generating a viewing history about broadcast programs viewed by a user in the past; second means for obtaining auxiliary program information accompanying broadcast programs; third means for calculating at least a degree of suitability of user's preference for each of the broadcast programs from the viewing history generated by the first means and the auxiliary program information obtained by the second means; fourth means for setting decision measures in response to the suitability degrees calculated by the third means for the respective broadcast programs and the viewing history generated by the first means, the decision measures being for decisions each about which of two of future broadcast programs more suits to user's preference; and fifth means for ranking the future broadcast programs in response to the decision measures set by the fourth means; wherein the fourth means comprises (1) means for selecting one from past broadcast programs corresponding to the viewing history as a viewed broadcast program, (2) means for setting the suitability degree for the viewed broadcast program as first information, (3) means for setting the suitability degree for a non-viewed broadcast program not viewed by the user and having an on-air time range equal to that of the viewed broadcast program as second information, (4) means for generating third information representing that the user selected the viewed broadcast program rather than the non-viewed broadcast program, (5) means for applying the operation of the means (1), (2), (3), and (4) to each of all possible pairs of viewed broadcast programs and non-viewed broadcast programs to obtain the first information, the second information, and the third information for all the possible pairs, and (6) means for setting the decision measures in response to the obtained first, second, and third information; and wherein the fifth means comprises (7) means for selecting two from the future broadcast programs as paired future broadcast programs, (8) means for deciding which of the paired future broadcast programs more suits to user's preference in response to the suitability degrees for the paired future broadcast programs and the decision measures, (9) means for applying the operation of the means (7) and (8) to each of all possible pairs of the future broadcast programs to obtain results of the deciding, (10) means for calculating a per-program number of times each of the future broadcast programs is decided to more suit to user's preference by referring to the obtained results of the deciding, and (11) means for ranking the future broadcast programs in accordance with the calculated per-program numbers of times.