Broadcast Transport Stream Multiplexing for Shared Channel Segments
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing broadcast systems inefficiently utilize network resources by treating substantially similar content on multiple channels as distinct, leading to duplicative operations and bandwidth wastage.
Innovation Solution
A system that determines similarities between content on different channels using metadata comparison and checksum calculations, updates metadata schema to identify common segments, and transmits only differing segments, allowing for efficient use of bandwidth and transmission of auxiliary content.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If substantially similar content on multiple channels is treated as distinct content during transmission, then each channel can be independently managed and transmitted, but network resources are inefficiently utilized and bandwidth is wasted due to duplicative operations
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges substantially similar content from multiple channels into a single transmitted feed. The headend identifies content similarity between channels and transmits only the unique portions, combining multiple channel streams into one efficient transmission that serves multiple channels simultaneously.
Solution Approach 2:
The transmitted content feed serves multiple functions by being reused across multiple channels. A single content transmission is made universal to support multiple channel outputs, allowing the same content to be distributed to different channels without requiring separate dedicated transmissions for each channel.
2Reliability
If substantially similar content on multiple channels is treated as distinct content, then complete content can be transmitted to each channel, but duplicative operations such as compression, multiplexing, and encoding are performed consuming excessive network resources
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and transmits only the unique or differing portions of content from each channel rather than transmitting complete duplicate content. The headend identifies and separates the unique segments from similar content, transmitting only these extracted unique portions to eliminate redundancy.
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of performing complete duplicative operations on entire content streams, the system performs partial operations only on the unique segments that differ between channels. This partial action approach applies compression, multiplexing, and encoding only where necessary rather than redundantly across all content.
3Loss of energy
If similar content is identified and transmitted once for multiple channels, then bandwidth is optimized, but the system must determine content similarity through complex operations such as comparing RGB matrices and metadata
Solution Approach 1:
The headend performs preliminary content analysis and similarity detection before the actual transmission process. By pre-identifying similar content segments and planning the optimized transmission strategy in advance, the system avoids complex real-time comparisons during transmission and prepares the efficient content distribution plan beforehand.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods are disclosed herein for optimizing bandwidth for broadcast transmission. The disclosed techniques herein provide for receiving first and second content for transmission to subscriber devices on a first and second channels. The system then determines whether the first and second content contain a common segment. If so, the system updates metadata schema (e.g., homogeneous channel descriptor, homogeneous switch descriptor) to indicate there is a common segment. The system may generate a transport stream during multiplexing of the first and second channels based on the updated metadata schema. The transport stream, for a time duration based on the at least one common segment, includes a first audio feed of the first content and a first video feed of the first content to be provided on the second channel. The system then transmits the transport stream to the one or more subscriber devices.