Method and System for Advertisement Detection and Substitution

• US 20090077580A1
• Filed: 09/05/2008
• Published: 03/19/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 03/07/2003
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: RPX Corporation
• Original Assignee: Technology Patents & Licensing Incorporated
• Inventors: Plotnick, Michael A., Eldering, Charles A., Igoe, Patrick T., Konig, Richard
• Application Number:
  US12/205,262
• Publication Number:
  US 20090077580A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 725/34
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
• CPC Class Codes: H04H 20/10 Arrangements for replacing or switching information during the broadcast or the distribution
• CPC Class Codes: H04H 20/14 for monitoring programmes
• CPC Class Codes: H04H 60/59 of video recognising characters or patterns in general G06F18/00, G06V20/00
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/2143 located in a single building, e.g. hotel, hospital or museum arrangements specially adapted for plural spots in a confined site in broadcast systems H04H20/63; adaptations for transmission by electric cable for domestic distribution in television systems H04N7/106
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/23418 involving operations for analysing video streams, e.g. detecting features or characteristics television picture signal circuitry for scene change detection H04N5/147; filtering for image enhancement G06T5/00; methods or arrangements for recognising scenes G06V20/00; arrangements characterised by components specially adapted for monitoring, identification or recognition of video in broadcast systems H04H60/59
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/23424 involving splicing one content stream with another content stream, e.g. for inserting or substituting an advertisement
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/235 Processing of additional data, e.g. scrambling of additional data or processing content descriptors
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/2547 Third Party Billing, e.g. billing of advertiser
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/25891 being end-user preferences retrieval of video data in a video database based on user preferences G06F16/739; arrangements for recognizing users' preferences H04H60/46; user profiles in network data switching protocols H04L67/306; processing of user preferences or user profiles in wireless networks H04W8/18
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/2668 Creating a channel for a dedicated end-user group, e.g. insertion of targeted commercials based on end-user profiles information retrieval from the Internet by querying with filtering and personalisation G06F16/9535; arrangements for replacing or switching information during the broadcast H04H20/10; push services over packet-switching network H04L12/1859; adaptation of message content in packet-switching networks H04L51/063
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/41415 involving a public display, viewable by several users in a public space outside their home, e.g. movie theatre, information kiosk
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/433 Content storage operation, e.g. storage operation in response to a pause request, caching operations
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4331 Caching operations, e.g. of an advertisement for later insertion during playback
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/435 Processing of additional data, e.g. decrypting of additional data, reconstructing software from modules extracted from the transport stream
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/44008 involving operations for analysing video streams, e.g. detecting features or characteristics in the video stream arrangements characterised by components specially adapted for monitoring, identification or recognition of video in broadcast systems H04H60/59
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/44016 involving splicing one content stream with another content stream, e.g. for substituting a video clip
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/458 Scheduling content for creating a personalised stream, e.g. by combining a locally stored advertisement with an incoming stream; Updating operations, e.g. for OS modules ; time-related management operations arrangements for replacing or switching information during the broadcast or during the distribution H04H20/10
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4755 for defining user preferences, e.g. favourite actors or genre retrieval personalisation and generation of user profiles for the retrieval of video data G06F16/739; user profiles in network data switching protocols H04L67/306
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/6112 involving terrestrial transmission, e.g. DVB-T
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/6125 : involving transmission via Internet transmission by internet of broadcast information H04H60/82
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/812 : involving advertisement data advertising per se G06Q30/02
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/8352 : involving content or source identification data, e.g. Unique Material Identifier [UMID]
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/84 : Generation or processing of descriptive data, e.g. content descriptors systems specially adapted for using meta-information in broadcast systems H04H60/73
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/8405 : represented by keywords
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/8456 : by decomposing the content in the time domain, e.g. in time segments
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 5/76 : Television signal recording
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 7/088 : the inserted signal being digital
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 7/0887 : for the transmission of programme or channel identifying signals
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 7/16 : Analogue secrecy systems; Analogue subscription systems

Abstract

A television signal substitution system that replaces standard video segments with selected replacement portions. Video segments such as advertisements are detected using techniques such as fingerprinting or manual detection. The detected video segment is replaced with a selected replacement portion and output to an output device.

Claims

1. A method of inserting advertisements based on the predicted duration of an ad break, the method comprising:

(a) receiving a video stream comprising a plurality of video frames;

(b) identifying a channel identifier associated with the video stream;

(c) identifying fingerprints for the plurality of video frames in the received video stream;

(d) determining if a known advertisement is present in the received video stream by comparing at least one of the determined fingerprints with at least one of a plurality of stored fingerprints representing one or more advertisements;

(e) detecting an initiation of an ad break in the video stream based on the determination in step (d);

(f) predicting a duration for the ad break based at least in part on the channel identifier; and

(g) inserting one or more advertisements in at least a portion of the video stream corresponding to the predicted duration of the ad break.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the inserting of step (g) includes removing at least one advertisement previously in the video stream.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

(h) calculating a number of advertisements that can be presented within the predicted duration; and

(i) inserting the calculated number of substitute advertisements in portion of the video stream corresponding to the predicted duration.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the inserting of step (i) includes removing at least one advertisement previously in the video stream.

5. The method of claim 3, further comprising:

(j) calculating the remaining time in the ad break after the calculated number of advertisements have been inserted; and

(k) inserting an advertisement with a duration less than the remaining time in the ad break into the video stream after the calculated number of advertisements have been inserted in step (i).

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the advertisement with a duration less than the remaining time in the ad break is a series of still images.

7. The method of claim 3, further comprising:

(j) delaying the received video stream in an amount of time approximately equal to the time for processing steps (c) through (e); and

(k) returning to the received video stream once the number of advertisements calculated in step (h) have been inserted.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the advertisements inserted in step (g) are selected based upon the fingerprints identified in step (c).