US 2,007,005,795 · Filed 2006-09-07

The Patent That Turned Mobile Phones Into Interactive Video Players

Imagine bundling video, text, audio, and graphics into a single neat package that your phone can unpack and play without needing anything else. This patent describes a system for creating interactive multimedia files that control their own playback and let you interact with different video layers — basically the blueprint for how modern streaming apps organize their content.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a method for combining multiple types of media — video, text, audio, music, and graphics — into self-contained objects that carry their own instructions for how to display themselves. What's protected here is the specific way these objects are bundled into packet streams, grouped into scenes with format definitions, and then organized so a decoder can parse and render them dynamically. The system also covers the interactive controls that let users manipulate which video layers appear and how the media composition looks.

Why it matters

This patent addresses a real technical problem from the early 2000s: how to send rich, interactive multimedia over wireless networks to devices like phones and PDAs when bandwidth and processing power were severely limited. By bundling media intelligently into self-contained objects, the system reduces redundancy and lets devices decode only what they need. For a company like Activesky, this represented a competitive advantage in the emerging mobile multimedia space when streaming was still novel.

Real-world use

When you watch a video on your phone that has clickable overlays, captions you can toggle, or interactive elements, you're experiencing the kind of structured media composition this patent describes.

Original USPTO abstract

A method of generating an object oriented interactive multimedia file, including encoding data comprising at least one of video, text, audio, music and/or graphics elements as a video packet stream, text packet stream, audio packet stream, music packet stream and/or graphics packet stream respectively, combining the packet streams into a single self-contained object, said object containing its own control information, placing a plurality of the objects in a data stream, and grouping one or more of the data streams in a single contiguous self-contained scene, the scene including format definition as the initial packet in a sequence of packets. An encoder for executing the method is provided together with a player or decoder for parsing and decoding the file, which can be wirelessly streamed to a portable computer device, such as a mobile phone or a PDA. The object controls provide rendering and interactive controls for objects allowing users to control dynamic media composition, such as dictating the shape and content of interleaved video objects, and control the objects received.

Patent details

Publication number: US 2,007,005,795
Filing date: 2006-09-07
Grant date: Application — not yet granted
Assignee: Activesky, Inc.
Inventor(s): GONZALEZ RUBEN
CPC class: G11B27/10

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