Unified Multimedia Interface Aggregating Multiple Web Sources
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional methods for accessing and playing multimedia content online require users to navigate multiple websites, use different media players, and lack a unified interface, making it difficult for users to find and play content, especially in a 'living-room' viewing experience, and can result in lost revenue opportunities for content owners.
Innovation Solution
A server-side process that indexes multimedia content from multiple sites, providing a unified user interface on a client device for navigation and playback using a single media player, allowing users to control content selection with remote devices and preserving content owners' presentation and revenue models.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If users visit multiple multimedia websites to find desired content, then users can access a wider variety of multimedia content, but users must navigate through different user interfaces and use different media players, increasing complexity and difficulty of operation
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple multimedia websites into a single unified interface that aggregates content from various sources. Users access all multimedia content through one consistent interface rather than visiting multiple separate websites, eliminating the need to learn different navigation systems and media players for each site.
Solution Approach 2:
The unified interface provides universal access to multimedia content from multiple sources through a single media player. The interface can handle different content types and sources using consistent interaction methods, making the system multi-functional while maintaining ease of use.
2Loss of information
If users manually check multimedia websites for new content, then users can discover newly available multimedia content, but users must return to each website and manually determine availability, consuming time and effort
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by automatically monitoring and indexing multimedia content availability across multiple websites in the background. This continuous automated checking eliminates the need for users to manually visit each website to check for new content, as the system maintains an updated index of available content.
3Ease of operation
If content aggregation sites purchase and aggregate multimedia content, then users can access content from multiple providers through a single website, but content owners lose control of user experience and revenue opportunities
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary system that aggregates content information from multiple websites without requiring content owners to transfer control. The intermediary index manager collects and normalizes content data while preserving links to original content sources, allowing users to access content through a unified interface while content owners maintain control of their platforms and revenue streams.
Data Source
AI summary
Automatically and repeatedly crawling multiple multimedia websites to identify and collect information about the multimedia content that is available for delivery over the Internet to a client device for playback on a media player operating on the client device. In one embodiment, the method normalizes the collected information by converting the different formats of the collected information into a common format and converting the different nomenclatures of the collected information into a common nomenclature. The method updates an index with the normalized information, and sends a data feed to the client device to populate the user interface on the client device with the normalized information of the index. The user interface allows the user to navigate and select the multimedia content that is available for delivery over the Internet for playback on the media player.