US 6,834,195 · Granted 2004-12-21

The Patent That Taught Your Phone to Guess What You Want to Watch

Imagine a smart scheduler living inside your phone or cable box that figures out what videos, shows, or content you'd actually enjoy—without you having to ask. It learns your tastes, compares them to available content, and automatically downloads shows ahead of time so they're ready when you want them. It's like having a personal DJ for your screen.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a software scheduling system that lives on a network or device and automatically matches user preferences to available digital content. What's protected here is the specific process: storing content with metadata wrappers, building contextual profiles for both users and content, comparing those profiles using randomized selection methods, and then delivering matched content to devices at scheduled times. A competitor couldn't replicate this exact matching-and-scheduling workflow without licensing the patent.

Why it matters

This patent arrived at a pivotal moment in digital media—when broadband was becoming mainstream and devices like set-top boxes were starting to cache and schedule content delivery. By automating content discovery and pre-loading, it addressed a real friction point: users had to manually search for what to watch. The patent essentially describes an early ancestor of recommendation engines and intelligent content delivery systems that now power streaming platforms, though the technical specifics around constrained randomization and metadata wrappers may or may not have seen widespread adoption in the exact form claimed.

Real-world use

When your streaming app suggests a show you'd actually want to watch, or when a cable box pre-loads content overnight to save bandwidth, you're encountering ideas that trace back to this patent's core concept.

Original USPTO abstract

A method and apparatus wherein a software scheduling agent resides on a communication network and/or client device, such as location-aware wireless communication appliances, television set top boxes, or other end user client devices is disclosed. The software scheduling agent is part of a probabilistic modeling system in which the scheduler operates to perform constrained random variation with selection. Digital content is generated, organized, and stored on the communication network and/or the client devices. An electronic digital content wrapper, which holds information in the form of data and metadata related to the digital content is associated with each item of digital content. Contextual profiles for each user and each item of digital content are established by the users and the network and maintained by a service provider on the communication network. The software scheduling agent compares the contextual digital content profile for each item of digital content to the contextual user profile for each user to determine which digital content should be offered for presentation to each user. The comparison and determination of which items of digital content should be offered for presentation to which users is performed by a process of constrained random variation. After the software scheduling agent determines which items of digital content would most likely be relevant or interesting to the user, the digital content is transmitted, either in whole or in part, at predetermined times over the communication network to the appropriate client devices. The digital content is then stored, either in whole or in part, in cache memory on the client device until an appropriate time when the digital content is digitally packaged and presented to particular users over those user's client devices.

Patent details

Publication number: US 6,834,195
Filing date: 2001-04-04
Grant date: 2004-12-21
Assignee: Carl Brock Brandenberg / Robert L. Kay / Kenneth J. Maxwell / R. Brandon Cotter
Inventor(s): BRANDENBERG CARL BROCK, KAY ROBERT L., MAXWELL KENNETH J., COTTER R. BRANDON
CPC class: H04L67/306

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