Patent ID: 7769416

Claim:
A method for saving power on a network access device, comprising the steps of: receiving a notification message that identifies multimedia content available for play on the network access device, wherein the multimedia content is in a plurality of formats in different qualities, checking the notification message for a user defined message priority score, wherein the priority corresponds to one of a plurality of urgency levels including critical, informative, and deferrable, as an attribute for each message; implementing a power optimization policy for the network access device wherein the power optimization policy adjusts battery consumption based on the user defined priority; and responsive to the user defined message priority score and the power optimization policy, wirelessly sending the notification message to an alerting device configured to enable a user to select at least some of the multimedia content available for play on the network access device, further comprising a message download policy in accordance with Y=(P*EOS)−S/10 6 , wherein P is a priority score, EOS is an energy optimization score, and S is the size in bytes of the smallest video format of the multimedia content, and the method further comprises the step of automatically downloading the highest quality multimedia content for small values of Y.