US 5,027,400 · Granted 1991-06-25

Hitachi's 1991 Patent for On-Demand TV Before Netflix Even Existed

Imagine a cable box that lets you pick what shows and ads you want to watch, and the broadcaster sends them to you on demand. That's what Hitachi patented in 1991 — a system where a central broadcast station compresses video, breaks it into data packets, and delivers custom programs to your home based on what you selected.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a complete system architecture for broadcasting video and commercials on demand. What's protected here is the combination of: a broadcast station with program and commercial databases, a main control unit that tracks subscriber preferences, video compression technology (image encoder), a cell assembler that packages data for transmission, and an ATM exchange that routes those data packets to individual subscriber terminals with decoders and TV displays. The entire chain — from preference selection through delivery and decoding — is what the patent locks down.

Why it matters

This patent represents an early vision of interactive television and video-on-demand, filed in 1989 when most households still watched broadcast TV on fixed schedules. Hitachi was patenting the infrastructure for personalized, subscriber-controlled content delivery — a concept that became fundamental to modern streaming and cable systems. The technology's focus on bandwidth compression and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) was cutting-edge for managing high-volume video delivery over limited network capacity.

Real-world use

Every time you use a cable box or streaming service to select a show and have it appear on your TV moments later, you're using logic that traces back to systems like the one Hitachi patented — though modern versions are far more sophisticated.

Original USPTO abstract

A multimedia bidirectional broadcast system including a broadcast station and subscriber terminals. The broadcast station includes a main control unit having therein a data base control table in which program and commerical down load sequences are recorded depending on a setting effected by a subscriber, a motion picture program data base, a commerical data base, a program transmitter for effecting accesses and transmissions of transmission programs onto transmission lines based on the setting of the main control unit, a commercial transmitter for accessing the commerical data base and for transmitting content thereof based on the setting of the main control unit, an image encoder for achieving a bandwidth compression on a video signal, a cell assembler for processing data to be transmitted onto a broadband transmission line so as to generate a cell of the data, and an asynchronous transfer mode exchange for delivering the cell to a subscriber system associated therewith. Each of the subscriber systems includes a network terminal, a terminal control unit, a decoder to decode the compressed video signal, and a television monitor.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,027,400
Filing date: 1989-08-16
Grant date: 1991-06-25
Assignee: Hitachi Ltd.
Inventor(s): BAJI; TORU, NAKANO; YUKIO, TANABE; SHIRO, NAKAGAWA; TETSUYA, KOJIMA; HIROTSUGU
CPC class: H04H60/31

View original record on Google Patents →

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