US 2,003,110,503 · Filed 2002-10-25

The Patent for Organizing All Your Streaming Content in One Place

Imagine a remote control that understands every streaming service you use—Netflix, YouTube, Disney+—and organizes everything by genre, actor, or mood instead of making you jump between apps. This patent describes a system that talks to all your media sources at once and lets you search and play stuff using a single, smart interface.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a system that collects metadata (like title, genre, and type) from multiple media sources, groups that information into descriptors, and presents it through a unified interface where users can search and command playback. What's protected here is the architecture of pulling disparate media catalogs together and organizing them intelligently so a user doesn't have to navigate each source separately.

Why it matters

This patent addresses a real pain point: by the early 2000s, consumers had access to multiple media sources but no unified way to browse them. The patent stakes out the core idea of a 'hub' that aggregates media from different platforms and organizes it by metadata. While the patent language is technical, the underlying concept became foundational to how streaming aggregators and smart TV platforms eventually worked.

Real-world use

When you use a smart TV app or streaming aggregator that shows you recommendations from multiple services in one feed, you're interacting with the kind of metadata-organizing system this patent describes.

Original USPTO abstract

A system, method and computer program product is disclosed for presenting media to a user in a media on demand framework. A plurality of media objects are defined for media from one or more media sources. Each media object comprises information relating to a media type and a metadata descriptor. A set of metadata descriptors is defined based on at least a portion of the media objects. An interface is presented to a user through which information is organized based on the set of metadata descriptors. The user is permitted to issue commands relating to the media objects via the interface. Media associated with the media objects from the one or more media sources is presented to the user based on the issued commands.

Patent details

Publication number: US 2,003,110,503
Filing date: 2002-10-25
Grant date: Application — not yet granted
Assignee: Perkes Ronald M.
Inventor(s): PERKES RONALD M.
CPC class: H04N21/44213

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