Alcatel Lucent

Imagictv, Inc.

Alistair John Parker

Sean Gordon Higgins

Jeff Furlong

Gino Louis Dion

Robert J Beaton

Jared David McNeill

David Cecil Robinson

Richard Bettelheim

Christian Van Boven

A method for accessing triple play services provided through a server over a network to a portable device, the method comprising: receiving a signal from a user defining respective preference levels for the triple play services; determining a location for the portable device; determining which of the triple play services are available at the location; composing a list of available services at the location, the available services in the list being ordered in accordance with the respective preference levels; and, displaying the list on a display screen of the portable device, whereby the user may access the available services by selecting from the list.

Portable contextual menu for triple play service

A method and apparatus are provided for displaying an electronic program guide in a 3D rendered landscape. Program blocks, each having a channel and a program time, are displayed as vertical blocks within the 3D rendered landscape. Channel information blocks are also displayed, one for each distinct channel of the program blocks. The EPG may be perused by navigating within the 3D rendered landscape. Flags are provided for highlighting program blocks which satisfy a user-specified criterion, such as favorite show. Perspective within the 3D rendered landscape allows many program blocks to be displayed, with program blocks for farther channels being compressed. The flags allow a user to see that there is a program of interest in the distance, and to navigate towards the associated program block in order to obtain further details.

3D electronic program guide

A server at the edge of a broadband network distributes multimedia content streams to clients, while ensuring that the first data delivered to each client is key data (milestones) needed for correctly decoding the stream content. This is obtained by buffering the packets in the incoming stream and transmitting the packets from the buffer in an outgoing stream, starting with the most recent milestone placed in the buffer before a request to join the respective incoming stream is received. As the writing to and reading from the buffer are performed at different rates, the incoming and outgoing streams are eventually synchronized, at which point the client may be switched to receive the incoming stream directly.

Milestone synchronization in broadcast multimedia streams

In a system that provides decoding of A/V streams, this invention reduces switching delays between different streams by modifying the Program Identification (PID) values of the Audio and Video data to respective PID values that are already known by the decoder. This technique allows the decoder to stay in a run state when switching between A/V streams, thereby reducing channel change times.

Client side PID translation

The PIP system enables display of a mosaic of favorite channels in a Picture-in-Picture (PIP) format to a subscriber terminal. Picture-in-Picture support is efficiently provided by sending only I-Frames of the secondary video channel to the end-user. That is, any unnecessary packets (null, B-P frames, audio, etc.) in the secondary video channel are stripped away. This method uses very little bandwidth and is STB agnostic.

Picture-in-picture mosaic

The multimedia content delivery system is a low-cost enabler for many MPEG-based applications enabling the subscribers to play multicast MPEG streams. A plurality of files with MPEG encoded multimedia content are stored at a server and streamed to the subscribers using a multithreaded processing system (or MPEG sender). The sender operates in a snoop mode or in an open loop mode. In the snoop mode, a main thread performs an IGMP snoop looking for membership reports (leave, join, change channel), and configures a plurality of sender threads based on these reports. Each sender thread transmits a multicast data stream with encoded multimedia content from a respective file to a corresponding multicast address. In the open loop mode, the sender transmits multicast data streams to all multicast addresses continuously.

Multimedia content delivery system

Methods, devices and systems for providing content providers with a secure way to multicast their data flows only to legitimate end users. By making a specific decision for each potentially legitimate end user requesting a specific data flow, differing subscriber profiles may be taken into account. Furthermore, end to end encryption is avoided by having a switch and/or router control the specific data flow to a specific end user. Each end user sends a request DTU to the switch and/or router asking for permission to join a multicast group. The switch and/or router extracts identification data from the request data transmission unit (DTU) and determines whether the requesting end user is cleared for the requested specific data flow. This determination may be made by sending a query DTU containing the identification data to a policy server which checks the identification data against preprogrammed criteria in its databases. The policy server then sends a response DTU to the switch and/or router confirming or denying the authenticity or legitimacy of the request based on the identification data. In the meantime, after the switch and/or router sends the query DTU to the policy server, the switch and/or router allows the specific requested data flow to proceed to the requesting end user. If, based on the response from the policy server, the request is determined to not be legitimate or authentic, the specific data flow is terminated. If the request is legitimate or authentic, then the data flow is allowed to flow uninterrupted by the switch and/or router.

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Quispamsis, Canada

Alistair John Parker