Patent · US Expired

Method and system for providing an analog voice-only endpoint with pseudo multimedia service

US6020915A · kind A · utility

102Cited by
11References
30Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateOct 22, 1996
Grant dateFeb 1, 2000
Priority date
Expiry dateOct 22, 2016

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04M2201/41
  • WIPO fieldAudio-visual technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

An enduser at a POTS analog voice-only endpoint (136) and endusers at H.320 standard multimedia terminals (101, 102, 103, 104), which each communicate over separate voice, video and data streams, engage in a videoconference with each other in a pseudo multimedia manner through a central platform (135) that provides call conversion capabilities. A document to be shared by a user at the POTS endpoint with users at the multimedia endpoints is transmitted as a data signal from a facsimile machine (137) or PC terminal (138) associated with the POTS user to a server (146) in the platform. The received data signal is then inputted to a multimedia bridge (124) and transmitted on the data stream to each multimedia endpoint for display on a window on each multimedia terminal. Similarly, a document to be shared by a multimedia endpoint is transmitted on a data stream to the multimedia bridge, where it is bridged on the data stream transmitted to the other multimedia endpoints and to the server. The document is then transmitted from the server to the facsimile machine or PC terminal associated with the POTS endpoint. In conventional multimedia conferencing arrangements, voice-activated switchi…

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.