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. 05, 1999
Filed:
Sep. 18, 1996
John E O'Neil, Framingham, MA (US);
George W Kajos, Westboro, MA (US);
VideoServer, Inc., Burlington, MA (US);
Abstract
A centralized multipoint conferencing arrangement uses a combination of multicast and unicast transmissions that is bandwidth efficient. A method of conferencing includes transmitting multimedia streams from endpoint terminals to a central resource such as a multipoint control unit (MCU) using unicast transmission. The multimedia streams are processed in the MCU and transmitted back to the endpoint terminals using multicast transmission. In addition, the MCU transmits other multimedia streams to selected endpoint terminals using unicast transmission. At the selected endpoint terminals, processing of the multimedia streams is inhibited in favor of processing the other multimedia streams.