Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Patent
1997-11-17
2000-05-09
Flynn, Nathan
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
348 1, H04N 5445
Patent
active
060610565
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention relates to a system for automatically monitoring broadcasts, such as television broadcasts, and detecting content of particular interest to individual viewers.
Many organizations, for example, stock brokerage services, have an on-going need to monitor world events. It is known for such organizations to retain media and news scanning services that employ people to watch television to look for particular topics of interest. These services log occurrences of particular items and either advise their customers by telephone or provide reports that may include video clips that they manually put together. For example, the service might continuously record a particular television channel while someone watches it. The person watching will record in a log the occurrences of interest, noting the time and tape position. The recorded tapes will later be searched using the time or tape position from the logs. Edited clips are then put together in a time consuming manual process.
The shortcomings with this method are many. The response time in noticing an event of interest is slow, typically minutes. Many hours may pass before the interested party is informed of the event. The cost of paying people to watch television is high. For example, at $10 per hour, twelve hours per day, the cost works out at $43,800 per channel per year. Looking up individual video clips is very slow and requires knowledgeable staff because the look-up is keyed to time of occurrence rather than words or phrases. Typical tape fast forwards or rewinds take three to five minutes each. The approach is also inflexible in that any new search on recorded video requires people to watch it all over again, thus incurring the entire overhead again.
Other solutions include raw television capture devices for computers. These capture devices convert the television video to digital format for storage and distribution on computer networks. These products capture the raw footage, but are not in any way dependent on content. They may capture and distribute video, and/or audio, and/or caption text, but they do not alert users to particular topics immediately as they occur on television broadcasts.
Another solution uses a technique called datacasting. With this technique, the broadcaster injects data into the vertical blanking interval (VBI) of the video television a signal that contains information about the program. The data is created by the broadcaster, or source program author. The data usually contains titles, summaries, and other information related to the program. This information can be used by the user to select items of interest. The disadvantage to this approach is that it requires special information to be created at the source and transmitted from the source. It also requires special proprietary hardware to receive the data, and more significantly still requires the user to continually monitor the datacast information. This VBI data injection approach has another major shortcoming in that very few, if any broadcast stations use this technique, and those that do encode it so that special equipment is required to decode it. CNN at Work, sold by Intel is an example of such a product.
An object of the invention is to alleviate the aforementioned disadvantage of the prior art.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to the present invention there is provided a system for monitoring broadcast signals, comprising means for receiving the broadcast signals and generating program signal streams to make available programs carried by said broadcast signals; user-operable selection means for inputting criteria identifying program content of interest to a user; a database for storing data representing said criteria; recognition means for generating from said broadcast signals, for each program stream, a program data stream separate from said program streams, said program data stream being representative of program content and changing dynamically therewith; means for synchronizing said program data stream to said program signal streams; a comparator for
REFERENCES:
patent: 5019899 (1991-05-01), Boles et al.
patent: 5481296 (1996-01-01), Cragun et al.
MacLean Roger
Menard Robert
Streatch Paul
Flynn Nathan
Telexis Corporation
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