SINGULAR, COLLECTIVE AND AUTOMATED CREATION OF A MEDIA GUIDE FOR ONLINE CONTENT

• US 20100250532A1
• Filed: 01/07/2010
• Published: 09/30/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 01/07/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Sonic IP Incorporated (Endeavor Group Holdings Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Sonic IP Incorporated (Endeavor Group Holdings Inc.)
• Inventors: Gravel, Francois, Landeros, Porfirio, Salmonsen, Dan, Soroushian, Kourosh, Priyadarshi, Shaiwal
• Granted Patent: US 8,510,303 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/736
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 15/16 Combinations of two or more digital computers each having at least an arithmetic unit, a program unit and a register, e.g. for a simultaneous processing of several programs coordinating program control therefor G06F9/52; in regulating and control system G05B
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24 Querying
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/285 Clustering or classification
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/438 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/48 Retrieval characterised by using metadata, e.g. metadata not derived from the content or metadata generated manually
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/483 using metadata automatically derived from the content
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/5866 using information manually generated, e.g. tags, keywords, comments, manually generated location and time information
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/7867 using information manually generated, e.g. tags, keywords, comments, title and artist information, manually generated time, location and usage information, user ratings
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9538 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/955 using information identifiers, e.g. uniform resource locators [URL]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9574 of access to content, e.g. by caching
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/23109 by placing content in organized collections, e.g. EPG data repository details of retrieval of video data and associated meta data in video databases G06F16/739
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/2387 Stream processing in response to a playback request from an end-user, e.g. for trick-play
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/278 Content descriptor database or directory service for end-user access details of content or meta data based information retrieval of video data in video databases G06F16/739
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4826 using recommendation lists, e.g. of programs or channels sorted out according to their score
• 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

Abstract

Systems and methods are provided in which a content guide includes one or more tags associated with a single user, a group of users or a channel subscribed to by users that enables the retrieval of content for subsequent viewing and which can be supplemented by recommendations and data from other sources.

Claims

1. A content guide system comprising:

a content server configured to provide access to content;

a tag server including a searchable database of tags;

a tagging device in network communication with the tag server and the content server, where the tagging device is configured to access content via the content server and to automatically generate at least one tag referencing the accessed content that is provided to the tag server for inclusion into the searchable database of tags; and

a playback device in network communication with the tag server and the content server, where the playback device is configured to search the database, retrieve from the database a tag that references content accessible via the content server and access the content referenced by the retrieved tag via the content server.

2. The content guide system of claim 1, wherein each tag includes an identifier of the content and location information of the content.

3. The content guide system of claim 2, wherein the identifier is a unique database identifier and the location information is associated to a uniform resource identifier.

4. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the identifier and the location information is substantially smaller in size than the content.

5. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the playback device is configured to request a tag referencing content stored on the content server to be added to or deleted from the database.

6. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the network communication is through the Internet.

7. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the network communication is through a local area network.

8. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the playback device is configured to receive content recommendation and the playback device is configured to request a tag referencing content to be added to the database based on the content recommendation.

9. The content guide system of claim 8 further comprising a recommendation server configured to search through the database and to transmit content recommendations to the playback device.

10. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the content recommendation is based on a selection criteria and the playback device is configured to create the selection criteria.

11. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the playback device is configured to receive pre-cached portions of the content.

12. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the content server is configured to obtain pre-cached portions of the content.

13. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the tag server does not contain the content.

14. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the content server stores a portion of the content.

15. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the tags does not include a temporal component.

16. The content guide system of claim 1 wherein the tags are a subset of data within a database having data unrelated to the tags and the content in which the tags refer.

17. The content guide system of claim 16 wherein the tags include at least one identifier associating the tags to a specific content guide within the database.

18. The content guide system of claim 17 wherein the database is larger in size than the database of tags.

19. A method of accessing content distributed throughout a network, the method comprising:

generating a tag referencing a piece of content accessible via a content server using a tagging device;

adding the generated tags to a searchable database of tags by a tag server; and

accessing the database, selecting at least one tag and retrieving content from the content server referenced by the retrieved tag by a playback device.

20. The method of claim 19 wherein each tag includes an identifier of the content and location information of the content.

21. The method of claim 19, wherein the identifier is a unique database identifier and the location information is associated to a uniform resource identifier.

22. The method of claim 19 wherein the identifier and the location information is substantially smaller in size than the content.