The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 22, 1996
Filed:
Apr. 06, 1995
Tadashi Okamoto, Osaka, JP;
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd, Osaka, JP;
Abstract
The present invention is a video-on-demand system, comprising an image data storage device, including a plurality of recording media, which stores image data for a plurality of programs divided into a plurality of blocks which are distributed among all of the recording media, an image data management device, including image data management tables in which management information for the image data is stored, which consults the image data management tables and transmits necessary information separately for each block, when there is a request from outside the device for information about one of the programs, these image data management tables including a title table corresponding a title of each of the programs with starting block identification information for each, a block table corresponding block identification information for each of the blocks with starting frame identification information for each block, and a frame table corresponding frame identification information for each frame with position information showing at which position on which recording medium out of the recording media each of the frames is stored, and an image data transmission device which requests to the image data management device for the necessary information for a transmission of a program requested by a user, receives the necessary information from the image data management device, retrieves image block data separately for each block from the recording media and transmits the image block data to the user.