Veton Z. Këpuska Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 5, Issue 4, ( Part -6) April 2015, pp.133-136 www.ijera.com 133 | Page Improving STB devices’ Parental control Veton Z. Këpuska, Mahmood Alfathe Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL 32901, USA ABSTRACT Parental control for TV viewers is an open field as many efforts were provided to provide trusted solutions for this issue. Although this technology was improved and developed, but it still leaks a good and robust solution as it is related to critical age of viewers. This paper introduce a new hybrid technology that depends on the information transmitted along with the Audio and Video (EPG), also extra resources from internet were used to enhance the decision in the EPG engine in the proposed system. All viewers enrolled in the system were successfully authenticated / de-authenticated depending on their registered age in the database and on the age related for each program. Keywords - parental control, IPTV, Authentication, EPG, web mining, text parsing. I. INTRODUCTION In the last decade electronic devices witnessed a huge development. One of these devices is the Set Top Box or STB. STBs are the front panel of the users who use satellite, cable, and IPTV technology to receive TV or Radio channels. Nowadays with the hardware development and the increase demand of users STB devices have many new features added to it like the ability of connecting them to the internet to use internet resources like the web streaming which is known as the IPTV. A lot of offers have been made to improve the ability of users to control the media broadcasted through their TVs or any other projecting device. The ability to control the media broadcasted to the children was a strong demand from 86% of parents who believed in the survey [1] that the decision about what children what should see on TV is the parents‟ responsibility not the governments. As a solution to control the media broadcasted to viewers, many of STB software companies adopted the “lock channel” option as a solution for TV parental control problem Parental control feature available in most STBs provides an option for parents or adults to lock channels with a master “4 numeric digits” password as they believe these channels may have improper content for their children. The survey in [2] shows that 88% of parents do not use the parental control. This work introduces a new technology to control what is broadcasted over media. As many information are broadcasted beside the data broadcasted which is initially the Audio and Video Data. The EPG, or the Electronic Programming Guide. The information included in the EPG can be hired to enhance the parental control. The system is implemented by developing an EPG engine to extract necessary information. This engine is programmed using Python environment, as Python can run on both Windows and Linux operating systems, to make sure the proposed system has an ability to run on different platforms. Users with phones and tablets are able to view media with the variety of platforms that operate these devices as this service is being provided within the application layer which is a standardized layer among different operating systems. II. LITERATURE REVIEW In the last two decades, many methods have been developed for improving parental control. In 1989, Euro-crypt systems required Conditional Access (CA) from customers to view the provided programs [3]. A (CA) is defined as method by which one can obfuscate a digital-television stream, with access provided only to those with valid decryption smart- card [4]. In 1990 the British Satellite Broadcasting, the first company which provided direct broadcasting through satellite, required from all customers to provide a password or a pin number to view a user- selectable threshold program [5]. In 1997 Digital library Architecture for interactive television was implemented [6] as (the librarian) was introduced to manage the digital library content for end users to manage their overall preferences. In 2001 [7] researchers proposed a system of a pre-determined parental viewing for the ATSC digital TV. The V- chip [8] which reads the information encoded in the rated program and block unwanted programs depending on the rating setup selected by parents. The V-chip was enforced to be equipped for all TV manufacturers who produce TVs of (13 inches) or larger. In [9] a management system at the cable service provider was suggested, this system depends on extra settings of parents for all channels that they are subscribed to, these settings could be changed anytime over internet. In 2007, an authentication procedure using fingerprint and face detection methods to get access to the network was suggested [10]. In 2007 [11] researchers proposed a parental RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS