a method and system for decoding a transport stream are disclosed . in one embodiment , the method includes receiving a system information table in the transport stream , reading an activation time from the system information table , storing the table in a memory without activating values contained in the system information table , determining when the activation time is reached , and activating the values contained in the system information table when the activation time is reached . an advantage of the present invention is that the program and system information tables can be transmitted less frequently and still allow the receiver to execute the acquired “ next ” tables in a timely manner , once the tables have been received for the first time and their activation times have arrived . another advantage of the present invention is its backward compatibility with the existing protocol formats , because the present invention requires no syntactic modification to the existing table formats .