Patent ID: 8601505

Claim:
An apparatus for global television (TV) channel sharing, operating as a sharing client, comprising: a registration module receiving a network address of a subscription client from a mediation server; a TV signal receiving module receiving local TV signals comprising live local TV program content after receiving the network address of the subscription client; a multimedia data encoding module encoding the local TV signals into a bitstream; and an Internet communication module transmitting the bitstream to the subscription client corresponding to the network address via the Internet, wherein the registration module issues a registration request with a TV program/channel and a sharing time period to the mediation server, the sharing time period defining a start time and an end time between which live local TV program content of the TV program/channel is made available to the subscription client when a sharing score of the subscription client stored in the mediation server exceeds a lower limit, the sharing score of the subscription client representing a duration of time during which the subscription client previously shared live local TV program content with other clients, with a higher sharing score representing a longer duration.