Patent ID: 11871303
Assignee: CABLE TELEVISION LABORATORIES, INC.
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 0:
1. For use in a system having first and second heterogeneous networks that transmit content over broadcast tiers and multicast tiers, the broadcast tiers indiscriminately transmitting the content to a number of users and the multicast tiers discriminately transmitting the content to some number of users less than the number of users broadcasted content, a method that supports continuous access to multicasted content when a user transitions from the first to the second network, comprising:
determining a number of multicast groups operating on the multicast tiers of the first and second networks;
determining content being simultaneously multicasted on both of the first and second heterogeneous networks;
identifying multicasted content being accessed by the user;
if the identified content is being simultaneously multicasted over the second network, transmitting instructions that transition user access to the identified content from the first network according to a first codec of the first network, to the second network according to a second codec of the second network, the instructions including (i) information sufficient to locate the multicast group of the second network also identified to be multicasting the identified content, (ii) parameters of the second codec of the second network, and (iii) at least one address of the multicast group of the second network,
wherein the first network is a wired network and the second network is a wireless mobile network.