METHOD FOR ENHANCING TELEVISION ADVERTISING VIEWERSHIP

摘要

A method and apparatus for enhancing television advertising viewership. Advertisers deliver content demographic and associated data as metadata along with content to a service that is in communication with a large number of multimedia devices. Each device supplies information to the service that tells about the user of the device's content viewing preferences. The service compares user information to content metadata to find content for the user. The service sends the selected content to the multimedia device. Advertisers whose content were downloaded to the multimedia device may be charged a fee for the download. The multimedia device sends statistics regarding the user's action when the user viewed the content to the service. The service charges a fee to advertisers that had their content viewed by the user.

主权项

1. A method for distributing content to multimedia devices, comprising:
receiving, at a server, content and associated metadata from content providers, the received content including at least one of: video content, audio content, text content, graphical content, or multimedia content, the received associated metadata including at least one of: content title, content synopsis, information specifying what program or type of program a content item of the content should be played during, information specifying that a content item of the content is to be played before or after a program, or information specifying that a content item of the content be displayed in a specific user interface screen; receiving, at the server, a user's content viewing preferences; matching, at the server, the user's content viewing preferences with the received content using the received associated metadata; enqueuing, at the server, (a) a plurality of content items as matched content and (b) content information about the plurality of content items in a content queue at the server specifically for the multimedia device, the same content queue being used by the server to send queued content items to the multimedia device in response to synchronizations between the server and the multimedia device; in response to a synchronization between the server and the multimedia device, sending, by the server, the matched content and the content information in the content queue to the multimedia device.