A scalable fast channel change solution

The transition from analogue to digital television provided many benefits such as better picture quality and/or more channels. However, there are disadvantages in the digital world as well; most prominently the channel change takes longer than the user was accustomed to in the former analogue world. Therefore various solutions have been developed to speed up the channel change in digital video broadcast. Most of the solutions have been proposed for IPTV systems and are assuming that there is additional infrastructure and a non standard compliant receiver. In this paper we propose a new fast channel change solution. In contrast to other solutions, our approach is scalable and relies only on the existing multicast infrastructure. There are no assumption about receivers, thus all existing standard compliant receivers will support the proposed method.