Patent · US Expired

Communicating logical addresses of resources in a data service channel of a video signal

US6400407B1 · kind B1 · utility

295Cited by
8References
29Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateJun 17, 1998
Grant dateJun 4, 2002
Priority date
Expiry dateJun 17, 2018

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04N21/8586
  • WIPO fieldAudio-visual technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A method and apparatus for communicating logical addresses within a broadcast television signal are provided. According to one aspect of the present invention, a logical address of a resource, e.g., a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), may be communicated to a receiving device, such as a set-top box, by way of a data service channel of a video signal. A sequence of data complying with a predetermined syntax and including the logical address is embedded in either a text service channel (e.g., T1, T2, T3, T4) or a captioning service channel (e.g., CC1, CC2, CC3, CC4) of the vertical blanking interval (VBI) of the video signal. According to another aspect of the present invention, a logical address of a resource may be received by way of a data service channel of a video signal. A video signal including data associated with one or more data services is received. Subsequently, a sequence of data complying with a predetermined syntax is retrieved from either a captioning service or a text service. Ultimately, a logical address may be extracted from the video signal by parsing the sequence of data. importantly, features of the present invention are applicable to many broadcast television (T…

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