System and method for providing subscription content services to mobile devices

摘要

The present invention relates to a method and system for providing content services to mobile devices. The method and system should provide these content services to the mobile devices while ensuring user privacy. The method and system should also allow one or more content providers that provide the content services to collect payment for the use of the content services. In one embodiment, a user makes a request for content from an affiliated content provider (Affiliated Content Provider A). This request travels from the wireless device (where it is a request over a radio frequency) thru one or more wireless infrastructure devices until it arrives as a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request over an Ethernet to a proxy server. The proxy server then requests the source Internet Protocol (IP) address of the wireless device that sent the request. The proxy server then sends the IP address to an identity agent having a very reliable database and is given a user identifier (or UID) to that IP address from the identity agent in return. The proxy server then looks at the HTTP request to determine IP address (or service ID) for the content provider. Using an algorithm, a unique content provider-specific identifier (or subnym) is calculated as the UID and the service ID (or, if it was already calculated, it can be looked up in a table where the previous calculation was recorded). The subnym is attached to the HTTP request by means of inserting an additional header (x-access-subnym) to the request. The HTTP request is forwarded to the affiliated content provider with the appended subnym. The affiliated content provider uses the subnym to determine the identity of the user.