Television schedule information transmission and utilization systems transmit TV schedule data and associated network control messages provided by computer as packets via the Video Blanking Interval (VBI) lines in the TV signal from various television program providers. This data is acquired by regional data processing systems and forwarded by the regional data processing systems to subscriber units and used to construct an internal database. This internal database can be accessed by the subscriber unit to display a TV schedule for the channels that are received by the user's TV.