Cookie-Based Unique Viewer Estimation for Media Servers
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Solution Overview
Problem
Content providers face significant challenges in estimating media engagement metrics, such as unique user counts and viewing durations, due to the large amounts of data storage, transmission, and processing required, especially when dealing with multiple content servers and devices that do not support cookies.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a system where content servers manage session state information by using cookie information to identify unique client devices and track media engagement, including sending a SessionID and LastSeen values to clients, which allows for efficient calculation of engagement metrics without intensive data processing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If content providers count all client device requests to estimate media engagement, then they can track popularity metrics, but they require immense data storage and processing resources
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the essential identifying information (cookie values) from client device requests rather than processing complete request data. By focusing solely on cookie-based identification, the system achieves unique user counting without the computational overhead of analyzing full request payloads, headers, and metadata from each client device.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary action by using pre-existing cookie identifiers that are already assigned to client devices. Rather than creating new identification mechanisms or processing raw device data, the patent leverages the cookie infrastructure that is already in place, thereby reducing the computational burden of user identification and tracking.
2Productivity
If content providers use cookie information to identify unique devices, then data processing is reduced, but devices that do not support cookies cannot be tracked
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses cookie information as an intermediary identifier between the client device and the content provider's counting system. For devices that support cookies, the cookie value serves as a efficient identifier. For devices that don't support cookies, the system falls back to alternative identification methods, thereby maintaining versatility while preserving the efficiency benefits of cookie-based tracking where applicable.
3Productivity
If multiple content servers are used to deliver media content, then content delivery capacity increases, but coordinating unique user counting across servers becomes more complex
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the unique user counting function across multiple content servers by having each server independently process and count unique cookie values it receives. Rather than requiring centralized coordination or complex inter-server communication protocols, each server autonomously contributes to the overall unique user count by processing its own subset of requests, thereby maintaining scalability while simplifying coordination.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods are provided for determining media engagement information related to client devices that do not support cookies. In some embodiments, a server may receive a request for a portion of live media content from a client device that does not support cookies. The server may identify a unique identifying characteristics associated with the media request. The server may determine a number of concurrent downloads of the live media content that are associated with the unique identifying characteristic. The server may further estimate a number of client devices associated with the unique identifying characteristic that have downloaded the live media content based on the number of concurrent downloads. In some embodiments, the server may also determine a number of computing devices that support cookie information and have downloaded the live media content to determine a total number of computing devices that have downloaded the live media content.