SELECTIVE MEDIA STREAM ADVERTISING TECHNIQUE

Abstract: A selective media stream advertising technique receives a media stream consisting of at least one of a video data stream, an audio data stream and a text data stream. If the media stream is tagged, the tag is recognized and relevant content data extracted therefrom. On the other hand, if the media stream has not been tagged, at least one of either a voice recognition or a pattern recognition or a word recognition is performed to extract the relevant content data. The extracted relevant content data is compared with stored advertising content to determine if there is a match. Upon their being a match between the extracted relevant content data and the stored advertising content, a relevant advertising page corresponding to the stored advertising content is generated and added to the media stream prior to forwarding the media stream to a client.

Description: SELECTIVE MEDIA STREAM ADVERTISING TECHNIQUE TECHNICAL FIELD The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications and more particularly, the present invention relates to a technique for selectively providing media stream advertising concurrently with and related to the media stream In advertising, it is considered very desirable to target advertisements to the appropriate potential customer base rather than to unselectively broadcast advertisements to the general public It has been known that, for example, advertisements for computers should generally not appear in fashion magazines and conversely, fashion advertisements should not appear in computer magazines Similarly, advertisers generally target their advertisements to television programs having the appropnate demographics for the product to be advertised With the widespread use of the Internet, advertisers have begun to utilize the Internet for advertising products and services in the same fashion that such products and services are presently advertised on television While many of the advertisement banners on a particular website are specifically geared to the subject matter of that website, more often than not, the advertisement banners on a general use website are untargeted and therefore inefficient and not particularly cost effective U S Patent No 5,937,392 to Alberts, entitled "Banner Advertising Display System and Method With Frequency of Advertisement Control," has attempted to alleviate the untargeted advertising problem by specifically targeting advertisements to users seeking certain types of information For example, a user searching for information on a yellow pages system or on a search engine for "photography" receives a targeted advertisement for a camera manufacturer Similarly, the advertisements can be targeted to users from a particular geographic location, etc U S Patent No 5,948,061 , to Merπman et al, entitled "Method of Delivery, Targeting, and Measuπng Advertising Over Networks," discloses an arrangement for the targeting of the delivery of advertisements over the Internet based on the tracking of data with regard to individual users U S Patent No 5,974,451 , to Simmons, entitled "System and Method for Distributing Bulletins to External Computers Accessing Wide Area Computer Networks," targets advertising on the Internet based on a specific request for information from a user U S Patent No 5,933,81 1 , to Angles et al, entitled "System and Method for Delivering Customized Advertisements Within Interactive Communication Systems," delivers customized advertisements to users on the Internet based on consumer profiles of the users Lastly, U S Patent No 5,999,912, to Wodarz et al , discloses a dynamic advertising scheduling, display and tracking arrangement for the Internet In the disclosed arrangement, advertisements are added to a requested web page in accordance with advertisement tag characteristics which include user based characteπstics such as age, gender, language, etc , advertisement tag selection based on the time of day or number of times that the advertisement has been selected during a specific time period, etc In addition, recent improvements in technology have allowed the widespread proliferation of higher speed Internet access, such as 56K modems, DSL (digital subscπber line) connections, cable TV Internet connections, etc The use of these high speed Internet connections have allowed for audio and/or video streaming, that is, media streaming, the transmission of audio and video signals over the Internet so as to produce picture and sound comparable to that of a standard television receiver Accordingly, advertisers ha\e been looking for ways to somehow provide Internet advertising which is related to the content of the audio or video stream so as to efficiently reach a target group SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention adds advertisements to outgoing media streams, that is, audio and video streams, on the Internet, for example, and allows for the updating of these advertisements so as to be related to the content of the audio and video streams, thereby targeting the desired target group A content scanner searches the video or audio stream, looking for different kinds of company logos and figures from the video and uses voice recognition or other types of technology based content parsers to glean words from the streaming audio Word recognition may also be performed if there is a text stream in the media stream. When the audio and video streams and text streams have been scanned and interpreted, the present invention integrates suitably related advertisements to the audio and video streams and forwards them to the user who is receiving the audio and video streams BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS The foregoing and a better understanding of the present invention will become more apparent from the following detailed descπption of example embodiments in the claims when read in connection with the accompanying drawings, all being part of the disclosure of this invention While the foregoing and following wπtten and illustrated disclosure focuses on disclosing example embodiments of the invention, it should be clearly understood that the same is by wav of illustration and example only and the invention is not limited thereto The spirit and scope of the present invention are limited only by the terms of the appended claims Fig 1 illustrates an example of an Internet advertising system in accordance with the present imention Fig 2 is a flowchart of an example of the operation of an embodiment of the present i ention Fig 3 illustrates an example of the content parsing server 130 of Fig 1 BEST MODE FOR CARRYING OUT THE INVENTION Fig 1 illustrates an example of an Internet advertising system in accordance with the present invention A TV broadcast 140 or a video broadcast 150 are inputted into the content parsing server with a tuner 130 It is, of course, understood that if the video broadcast 150 is already in the form of a video data stream and an audio data stream, rather than being a radio frequency signal, the content parsing server with tuner 130 does not in fact need a tuner As will be discussed in detail later, the content parsing server 130 scans the content of the video and audio data streams inputted thereto and based on the scanned content, adds advertising to the content pπor to forwarding the video and audio data streams to the web server 120 The web server 120 properly formats the video and audio data streams and forwards them to a client's computer 100 It is understood that the web server may be connected to the client computer 100 via the Internet or via a LAN (local area network) or WAN (wide area network) or intranet network, etc As illustrated in Fig 3. the content parsing server 130 includes the tuner 310 which, as noted above, may or may not be necessary depending upon the source of the audio and video data streams The output of the tuner 310 or the audio and video data streams 330 and 340 and optionally a text data stream 320 are inputted to a contents scanner 350 The contents scanner 350 may use voice recognition to determine the content of the audio data stream or may use video analysis engines for recognizing specific video images or may use other data recognition techniques, e g . word recognition, for scanning the text data stream 320, if available In addition, the audio and video data streams may optionally be tagged or marked with some type of markup language or can contain some other meta data to reveal the content of the stream The actual choice the configuration of the contents scanner 350 would of course depend upon the content and format of the video and audio and text data streams In view of the fact that video and audio data stream contents scanners are commercially available products (for example, the products of Excahbur Technologies, Mediasite and Virage), a detailed descπption of the configuration of the contents scanner 350 has been omitted for the sake of brevity The advertising page generator 360 includes a list of advertising pages stored therein along with a coπesponding list of contents related to each advertising page It does not actually generate the advertising page but rather provides the advertising page or information already stored therein That is, if the advertising page generator 360 includes an advertising page for an automobile manufacturer, any content detected by the contents scanner 350 which includes automobiles would cause the advertising page generator 360 to add the automobile advertising page to the video and audio data streams Similarly if the contents scanner 350 detects content with regard to flowers, the advertising page generator 360 might add an advertising page for either a garden implement manufacturer or a nationwide floral deln ery service Any content detected by the contents scanner which includes NOKIA text or voice would cause the advertising page generator 360 to add the NOKIA advertising page to the video and audio data streams Then the NOKIA advertising page may contain information of the recently published new terminals, e g , 71 10 etc The advertising page can be added to the video stream or it can stop video stream transmission in order to view the advertisement An advertising page 370 is generated based on the content data The πght banner picture is queried from a database and retπeved from a file system Instead of using a single database, one can also use XML (extensible markup language) and XSL (extensible style language), for example, which each separate content and layout from each other The web server 120 receives an automatically generated HTML (hyper text markup language) file from the advertising page generator 360 (which may be implemented with Java Servlets or ASP (active server page) or other service side technology with is sent over HTTP to the client computer 100 Some type of push technology, e g , RMI a remote method invocation), receiver applet, live connection and java scπpt, must be used so that the client gets the πght advertising banner πght after the key content of the video and audio data stream has been detected Fig 2 is a flowchart of an example of the operation of an embodiment of the present invention After the system is started m Step 200, the content parsing server receives a media stream, which may consist of a video stream and an audio stream, in Step 210 In Step 220, a determination is made as to whether or not the media stream (consisting of the video stream and audio stream) has been tagged, e g . with some kind of markup language or some other meta data that re\ eals the content of the media stream If the media stream has been tagged, the technique proceeds to Step 230 in which the tag is recognized and the relevant content data extracted from the tag Alternatively, if the media stream has not been tagged, Step 240, voice and/or pattern recognition on the media stream is effected to extract relative content data As noted abo\ e, at present there are several commercially available software programs which perform such voice and/or pattern recognition of a media stream In Step 250, the extracted relevant content data is compared with stored advertising content to determine if there is a match That is, is there a suitable advertising banner to be added with the currently transmitted media stream to provide targeted advertising to the client computer presently receiving the media stream If not, the flow returns to Step 210 to continue receiving the media stream However, if there is a match determined in Step 250, the flow proceeds to Step 260 m which the relevant advertising page or banner corresponding to the extracted content data is generated In Step 270, the generated advertising page or banner is forwarded to the web server to be combined with the cuπent media stream to thereby provide the targeted advertising to the client computer The flow then returns to Step 210 to continue to receive the media stream and perform the above noted functions continuously In this way, the client viewing streaming audio and video on his or her computer also receives relevant advertising directly related to the subject matter of the streaming audio and video Alternatively, in accordance with the present im ention, a video stream can be recen ed and if the video stream is determined to contain predetermined advertisement information, then the receiving of the video stream is stopped and the advertisement corresponding to the predetermined advertisement information is transmitted to the client where it is displayed on the display of the client After a predetermined period of time, the advertisement is no longer transmitted to the client and shown on the client ' s display but rather, the client then receives the video stream and displays it on the display of the client as before While there has been illustrated and descπbed what are considered to be examples of embodiments of the present invention, it will be understood by those skilled in the art that vaπous changes and modifications may be made, and equivalents may be substituted for elements thereof without departing from the true scope of the present invention Furthermore, many modifications may be made to adapt a particular situation to the teachings of the present invention without departing from the central scope of the present inv ention Therefore, it is intended that the present invention not be limited to the particular embodiments disclosed rather that the present invention includes all embodiments falling withm the scope of the appended claims

Claims: IN THE CLAIMS: 1 A selective media stream advertising method comprising the steps of receiving a media stream comprising at least one of a video data stream or an audio data stream or a text data stream, determining if the media stream is tagged and if so, recognizing the tag and extracting relevant content data, if it has been determined that the media stream has not been tagged, extracting relevant content data from the media stream, determining if the extracted relevant content data matches stored advertising content and if not, returning to the step of receiving the media stream, and if it has been determined that the extracted relevant content data matches stored advertising content, generating advertising information corresponding to the stored advertising content in order to forward it to a client 2 The method of claim 1 , wherein the media stream compπses a media stream on the Internet 3 The method of claim 2, wherein the media stream comprises a media stream requested by the client from an Internet server and the server forwards the requested media stream and generated advertising page to the client via the Internet 4 The method of claim 1, wherein said steps are performed by software 5 The method of claim 2, wherein said steps are performed by software 6 The method of claim 3, wherein said steps are performed by software 7 The method of claim 1 , wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 8 The method of claim 2, wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 9 The method of claim 3, wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 10 The method of claim 4, wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 1 1 The method of claim 5, wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 12 The method of claim 1 1 , wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 13 A selective media stream advertising apparatus compπsing a receiver for receiving a media stream compπsing at least one of a video data stream or an audio data stream or a text data stream, a first determining means for determining if the media stream is tagged and if so, recognizing the tag and extracting relevant content data; a means for extracting relevant content data from the media stream if it has been determined by said first determining means that the media stream has not been tagged, a second determining means for determining if the extracted relevant content data matches stored advertising content; and a means for generating advertising information corresponding to the stored advertising content m order to forward it to a client if it has been determined by said second determining means that the extracted relevant content data matches stored advertising content 14 The apparatus of claim 13, wherein the media stream compπses a media stream on the Internet. 15 The apparatus of claim 14 wherein the media stream comprises a media stream requested by the client from an Internet server and the server forwards the requested media stream and generated adv ertising page to the client via the Internet 16 The apparatus of claim 13, wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 17 The apparatus of claim 14, wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 18 The apparatus of claim 15, wherein the client comprises a mobile telecommunication terminal 19 A computer program embodied in a tangible medium for selective media stream advertising, the program compπsing the method steps of receiving a media stream compπsing at least one of a video data stream or an audio data stream or a text data stream, determining if the media stream is tagged and if so, recognizing the tag and extracting relevant content data, if it has been determined that the media stream has not been tagged, extracting relevant content data from the media stream, determining if the extracted relevant content data matches stored advertising content and if not, returning to the step of receiving the media stream, and if it has been determined that the extracted relevant content data matches stored advertising content, generating advertising information corresponding to the stored advertising content and m order to forward it to a client 20 The program of claim 19, wherein the media stream compπses a media stream on the Internet 21 The program of claim 20, wherein the media stream comprises a media stream requested by the client from an Internet server and the server forwards the requested media stream and generated advertising page to the client via the Internet 22 The program of claim 19, w herein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 23 The program of claim 20, wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 24 The program of claim 21. wherein the client compπses a mobile telecommunication terminal 25 The method of claim 1 , wherein extracting relevant content data from the media stream comprises performing at least one of voice recognition or pattern recognition or word recognition on the media stream 26 The program of claim 19, wherein extracting relevant content data from the media stream compπses performing at least one of voice recognition or pattern recognition or word recognition on the media stream 27 The apparatus of claim 13, wherein the means for extracting relevant content data from the media stream compπses a means for performing at least one of voice recognition or pattern recognition or word recognition on the media stream 28 The method of claim 1 , further compπsing adding the generated advertising information to the media stream 29 The program of claim 19, further compπsing adding the generated advertising information to the media stream 30 The apparatus of claim 13, further compπsing a means for adding the generated advertising information to the media stream 31 The method of claim 1 further comprising forwarding the media stream and additional advertising information to the client 32 The method of claim 31 , wherein the media stream and additional advertising information are forwarded separately to the client 33 The method of claim 31 , wherein the media stream and additional advertising information are forwarded substantially simultaneously to the client 34 The method of claim 31 , wherein the media stream and additional advertising information are displayed on different portion of a display of the client 35 The program of claim 19, further comprising forwarding the media stream and additional advertising information to the client 36 The program of claim 35, wherein the media stream and additional advertising information are forwarded separately to the client 37 The program of claim 35, wherein the media stream and additional advertising information are forwarded substantially simultaneously to the client 38 The method of claim 35, wherein the media stream and additional advertising information are displayed on different portions of a display of the client 39 The apparatus of claim 13, further compπsing a means for forwarding the media stream and additional advertising information to the client 40 The apparatus of claim 39, wherein the media stream and additional advertising information are forwarded separately to the client 41 The apparatus of claim 39, wherein the media stream and additional advertising information are forwarded substantially simultaneously to the client 42 The apparatus of claim 39, further compπsing a display of the client for displaying the media stream and additional advertising information on different portions thereof

Inventors: HAMEEN-ANTTILA TAPIO, KOPRA TONI, HAMEEN-ANTTILA, TAPIO, KOPRA, TONI
Applicants: NOKIA CORP, NOKIA INC, NOKIA CORPORATION, NOKIA INC.
Application year: 2000
Main classification: G06F17
IPC codes: G06Q30