Other

Pinpoint, Incorporated

Frederick S Herz

Lyle H Ungar

Jian Zhang

Marcos Salganicoff

David E Wachob

Jason M Eisner

Michael Negin

Mitchell P Marcus

A system and method for scheduling the receipt of desired movies and other forms of data from a network which simultaneously distributes many sources of such data to many customers, as in a cable television system. Customer profiles are developed for the recipient describing how important certain characteristics of the broadcast video program, movie or other data are to each customer. From these profiles, an 'agreement matrix' is calculated by comparing the recipient's profiles to the actual profiles of the characteristics of the available video programs, movies, or other data. The agreement matrix thus characterizes the attractiveness of each video program, movie, or other data to each prospective customer. 'Virtual' channels are generated from the agreement matrix to produce a series of video or data programming which will provide the greatest satisfaction to each customer. Feedback paths are also provided so that the customer's profiles and/or the profiles of the video programs or other data may be modified to reflect actual usage. Kiosks are also developed which assist customers in the selection of videos, music, books, and the like in accordance with the customer's objective profiles.

System and method for providing access to data using customer profiles

A system and method of presenting data from a plurality of data sources or objects which simultaneously distributes many sources of such data to many customers. Customer profiles are developed for the recipient describing how important certain characteristics of the data are to each customer. From these profiles, an 'agreement matrix' is calculated by comparing the recipient's profiles to the actual profiles of the characteristics of the available data. The agreement matrix thus characterizes the attractiveness of each data to each prospective customer, and is used to produce a series of data which will provide the greatest satisfaction to each customer. The customer's profiles and/or the profiles of the data may be modified to reflect actual usage.

System and method for providing access to video programs and other data using customer profiles

System and method for scheduling broadcast of and access to video

This invention relates to customized electronic identification of desirable objects, such as news articles, in an electronic media environment, and in particular to a system that automatically constructs both a 'target profile' for each target object in the electronic media based, for example, on the frequency with which each word appears in an article relative to its overall frequency of use in all articles, as well as a 'target profile interest summary' for each user, which target profile interest summary describes the user's interest level in various types of target objects. The system then evaluates the target profiles against the users' target profile interest summaries to generate a user-customized rank ordered listing of target objects most likely to be of interest to each user so that the user can select from among these potentially relevant target objects, which were automatically selected by this system from the plethora of target objects that are profiled on the electronic media. Users' target profile interest summaries can be used to efficiently organize the distribution of information in a large scale system consisting of many users interconnected by means of a communication network. Additionally, a cryptographically-based pseudonym proxy server is provided to ensure the privacy of a user's target profile interest summary, by giving the user control over the ability of third parties to access this summary and to identify or contact the user.

System for customized electronic identification of desirable objects

System for generation of object profiles for a system for customized

Pseudonymous server for system for customized electronic identification

System for generation of user profiles for a system for customized

A method and system for providing access to a plurality of video programs of a video library in accordance with viewer preferences. Members of the Home Video Club of the invention may phone in or write in their video program choices and the received viewer choices are tabulated in accordance with a selection priority scheme at the transmission side so that the most popular video programs as determined by the voter choices may be broadcast more regularly for the viewer's convenience. For this purpose, a 'prime time' viewing period is defined in accordance with the viewer preferences so that the more popular video programs can be shown more frequently to meet viewer demand. The selected video programs are broadcast over rented or dedicated cable television channels for reception by the viewer. The received video programs may then be recorded and time-shifted so that the viewers may view the video programs at their leisure. The technique of this invention is particularly advantageous in that the broadcast system is directly responsive to the viewer preferences and is dynamically programmable in accordance with those preferences so that differing numbers of regular and prime time programs may be viewed in a given time period. Revenue may be raised by charging for the viewer's calls and by the subscription fee for joining the Home Video Club.

Home video club television broadcasting system

Growing community of inventors

Davis, WV, United States of America

Frederick S Herz