Alcatel Lucent

Sound View Innovations, LLC

Jeff Furlong

Alistair John Parker

Sean Gordon Higgins

Gino Louis Dion

Robert J Beaton

David Cecil Robinson

Richard Bettelheim

Christian Van Boven

Robert Laughlin Cookson

Alistair John Paeker

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

The invention relates to a system and method for controlling an aspect of a communication session. The method processes the session through a subscriber terminal that also controls a separate a video signal. The method comprises: analyzing call data for the session to determine whether a calling party can initiate the session with a called party; if the calling party is allowed to initiate the session, sending information about the session to the terminal; generating a GUI session from the information for a video monitor connected to the terminal; allowing further processing of the session through the terminal through the GUI session; if a command is received to further process the session, providing a message to the network to process the command; and if a command is received to change an aspect of the video signal, providing an appropriate message to the terminal to process the command.

System and method for processing a conference session through a communication channel

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

For offering entertainment services by video streaming content to users, a video encoder creates the required .nsc file for each broadcast channel. This .nsc file is retrieved and stored on a server which notifies each set-top box in the field, via a multicast notifier of the availability of the new service. This notifier contains the multicast address and port to where the .nsc files are being streamed. Once the set-top box retrieves this notification, it attempts to join the dedicated multicast stream, download the .nsc files and store them locally in memory on the set-top box. When a user selects a broadcast channel from their lineup, the set-top box will access the local file to obtain the proper information about that particular ASF stream; hence, it will not have to do an HTTP retrieval.

Growing community of inventors

Grand Bay-Westfield, Canada

Jeff Furlong