Content Injection System for Seamless Streaming Audio
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Solution Overview
Problem
Broadcast radio stations face challenges in delivering a high-quality, seamless audio data flow to both broadcast and streaming audiences, as certain 'non-streamable' content segments, like advertisements, are not permissible for streaming audiences, leading to unnatural gaps in the streaming data flow.
Innovation Solution
A content injection system that separates the audiences by injecting alternative, streamable material during non-streamable content segments, using a variable-time-size buffer to seamlessly bridge gaps and ensure timely delivery of content segments to streaming audiences, without matching the exact duration of ad breaks with injection content.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the broadcast data flow is delivered directly to the streaming audience, then the full content including advertisements is transmitted, but the streaming audience receives non-streamable content that creates unnatural gaps and disruptions
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts and removes non-streamable content segments (advertisements) from the broadcast data flow before delivering to the streaming audience. The content separator identifies and extracts these harmful segments, allowing only streamable content to pass through to the streaming audience, thereby eliminating the unnatural gaps that would otherwise occur.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces an intermediary component (content separator and injection system) between the broadcast source and the streaming audience. This intermediary actively monitors the data flow, removes non-streamable segments, and injects alternative content to bridge the gaps, ensuring a seamless streaming experience without directly modifying the original broadcast source.
2Reliability
If alternative content is injected to mask non-streamable segments, then the streaming flow remains seamless, but the injection content duration may not exactly match the ad break duration causing timing mismatches
Solution Approach 1:
The system employs dynamic buffer management where the buffer size and timing are continuously adjusted to accommodate variations between ad break durations and injection content durations. The buffer dynamically absorbs timing differences, allowing the system to maintain seamless streaming even when injection content does not exactly match ad break lengths, thereby resolving the precision-matching problem through adaptive, real-time adjustment.
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes the timing parameters of content delivery by introducing a variable buffer that can expand or contract based on the duration mismatch between ad breaks and injection content. This parameter change allows the system to decouple the timing of broadcast content from streaming content, enabling seamless playback without requiring precise duration matching.
3Adaptability or versatility
If a buffer is used to store and forward content segments, then timing flexibility is achieved, but the buffer may accumulate content causing delays in delivering the latest content to the streaming audience
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-buffering content segments before they are needed for streaming. The content separator identifies upcoming content segments and pre-processes them, storing them in the buffer in advance. This preliminary action allows the system to have timing flexibility while minimizing actual delivery delays, as the content is ready when needed rather than being processed in real-time during playback.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements a strategy of skipping the buffering delay for time-critical content by using a sliding window approach where recently buffered content is prioritized for immediate forwarding. The system rushes through the buffer management process for content that is close to its playback time, minimizing the effective delay while maintaining the timing flexibility benefits of buffering for less time-critical segments.
Data Source
AI summary
A method, and an associated system, for sending to a first group of recipients only the content portions of a continuity source data-flow which takes the form of ordered, successive, alternating content and non-content segments. From a methodologic point of view, the invention involves, in a manner which utilizes content-segment material buffering, delivering fully, and in correct order, to the first recipient group the material in each content segment, via steps including (a) bridging each gap between next-adjacent content segments at least partially with transmitted injection material that differs from the non-content segment material in the gap, which injection material ends in time no sooner than the end of the gap, and (b) employing, as needed, and as a part of such full delivering of content-segment material, time-progressive, time-length-variable buffering, and subsequent, progressive buffer-delivering, of any content-segment material which overlaps in time with the transmission of injection material.