Interwise Ltd.

At&t Intellectual Property I, L.p.

Appstream Inc.

Symantec Corporation

Yehuda Volk

Rinat Zilberstein

Erez A Korn

Hans Fischmann

Yair Gil

Uri Raz

Dan Eylon

Shmuel Melamed

Amit Ramon

Dror Yashar

Matthew Van Houten

Avigayil Bar-Asher

Itzik Artzi

Bridget McDermott

Aspects of the subject disclosure may include, for example, a method of apportioning, by a processing system including a processor, a viewable area of a display screen into a main area and an application area; downloading, by the processing system, media content; displaying, by the processing system, the media content within the main area of the display screen; extracting, by the processing system, metadata from the media content; and providing, by the processing system, the metadata to an application, wherein the application: downloads information associated with the metadata provided in the media content, applies a bitrate limit to the downloading of the information to prevent interference with the downloading of the media content, generates display content based on the information, and sends the display content for displaying within the application area of the display screen concurrently with the media content being displayed in the main area of the display screen. Other embodiments are disclosed.

Method and apparatus for providing interactive applications with media content delivery services

Aspects of the subject disclosure may include, for example, a device that includes a processing system including a processor and a memory that stores executable instructions that, when executed by the processing system, facilitate performance of operations, where the operations include receiving a request from a viewer of a content stream to pause the content stream, displaying a pause screen, requesting an advertisement to display during the pause of the content stream, retrieving content for the advertisement, and displaying the advertisement as an overlay on the pause screen. Other embodiments are disclosed.

Pause screen video ads

Aspects of the subject disclosure may include, for example, receiving, from a first client device, a recommendation pertaining to an advertisement, storing a sender identification in association with an identification of the advertisement, wherein the sender identification includes an identification of the first client device, an identification of a first user of the first client device, or a combination thereof, determining that a score associated with the recommendation exceeds a threshold at least in terms of a likelihood of relevance of the advertisement to a second user of a second client device, based on the determining, transmitting the advertisement to the second client device based on the identification of the advertisement, and based on the determining, transmitting the sender identification to the second client device. Other embodiments are disclosed.

Method and apparatus for targeting media to a user via a third party

Aspects of the subject disclosure may include, for example, a device that has a processing system including a processor and a memory that stores executable instructions that, when executed by the processing system, facilitate performance of operations, the operations including receiving a request from a viewer of a content stream displayed by a TV client, wherein the request is received via a digital assistant, determining an advertisement campaign being displayed in the content stream, retrieving information on a product associated with the advertising campaign, and sending the information to the TV client, wherein the TV client displays the information concerning the product. Other embodiments are disclosed.

System and method to enable users to voice interact with video advertisements

Aspects of the subject disclosure may include, for example, a device that includes a processing system including a processor and a memory that stores executable instructions that, when executed by the processing system, facilitate performance of operations, where the operations include receiving a request from a viewer of a content stream to invoke a trick mode to seek another viewing location in the content stream, displaying a trick mode screen, requesting an advertisement to display during the trick mode, retrieving content for the advertisement, and displaying the advertisement after completion of the trick mode. Other embodiments are disclosed.

Snapback video ads

A method for determining an order in which to stream modules of an application from a server to a client, where the application uses modules in an execution-time dependent order, employs a predictive model to determine which module transitions are most likely to occur in the future in view of the clients present state in the application and then stream the modules to the client in the determined order. Different sets of transition weights can be used for clients falling into different categories, such as time of application use and age of the user at the client. Additional factors which can be used to select the order to stream the modules include cache utilization at the client and customized streaming orders specified by the user.

Method and apparatus for determining the order of streaming modules

A method and system for streaming software applications to a client uses an application server having a library with the application files stored therein. A streaming manager is configured to send the application files to a client as a plurality of streamlets, each streamlet corresponding to a particular data block in a respective application file. A streaming prediction engine is provided to identify at least one streamlet which is predicted to be most appropriate to send to a given client at a particular time in accordance with a prediction model reflecting the manner in which the application files are loaded and used by the application. In the preferred implementation, the application files are preprocessed and stored as a set of compressed streamlets, each of which corresponds to a file data block having a size equal to a code page size, such as 4k, used during file reads by an operating system expected to be present on a client system. In addition, the server is configured to send a startup block to a new streaming client containing a file structure specification of the application files and a set of streamlets comprising at least those streamlets containing the portions of the application required to enable execution of the application to be initiated.

System and method to send predicted application streamlets to a client device

Executable software sent from an application service provider to a client computer can be arranged as a bundle of executable code blocks that are used during initialization of a group of applications (at least one initialization block from each application being included in the bundle). The bundle can include code for applications that are subscribed to by a user as well as for applications not subscribed to. As the subscribed applications are executed, usage data sent to a server may be monitored to determine unsubscribed applications that may be of interest to the user. Subscription offers may be automatically generated and sent to the user in response to processing of the usage data. Transmission efficiency of the code blocks may be improved by exchanging identification codes between the server and client to determine code blocks already present at the client.

Network streaming of multi-application program code

An application is preprocessed for use in an application streaming environment by dividing each file in the application into blocks corresponding to the code page block size used by the operating system. Each block is compressed, and the compressed blocks from all of the files are packaged into a repository which permits specific blocks to be extracted. The repository and a specification for the application's file structure are combined into a streaming application package which can be distributed to servers supporting the streaming of the application to a client. The application package can also include environmental install information indicating changes introduced to the computer system by installation of the application on the computer system, a startup set indicating those blocks which are sufficient for execution of the application to be initiated and progress to a designated startup point, and a predictive model suitable for use by a streaming server.

Preprocessed applications suitable for network streaming applications and method for producing same

A method and system for executing a streamed application on a client system utilizes a virtual file system installed in the client which is configured to appear to the operating system as a local storage device containing all of the application files required by the application. Prior to streaming, the application files are broken up into streamlets corresponding generally to various portions of the application files and these streamlets are delivered to the client by the server, preferably using a predictive algorithm to determine an optimal transmission order. After an initial set of streamlets is received, the application is executed from the virtual file system. File loads issued by the operating system to the virtual file system are translated to determine which streamlets correspond to the load request and the appropriate data is returned. If a needed streamlet is not present, a streamlet request is issued to the server and the virtual file system maintains a busy status until the necessary streamlets have been provided.

Growing community of inventors

Tel Aviv, Israel

Yehuda Volk