Patent ID: 8498725

Claim:
For use in a distributed conferencing system to provide local meeting contents to remote participants from a plurality of authorized source units, each source unit having a respective source unit IP address, a method comprising: transmitting meeting announcement data to an announcement multicast IP address, the meeting announcement data specifying data, for a particular meeting, that includes a meeting multicast group IP address for a meeting multicast group and IP addresses for each of the authorized source units involved in the meeting; and in logic circuitry at each of the plurality of authorized source units, performing the steps of searching the meeting announcement data for the IP address of the authorized source unit, in response to the search, retrieving a portion of the meeting data that identifies the source unit, in response to the retrieved meeting data, generating media content responsive to and representative of respective portions of meeting contents for the meeting, in response to the generated media content, developing one or more data streams, each data stream being a separately-decodable real-time representation of at least a portion of the generated media content, and transmitting the one or more data streams to the meeting multicast group IP address in the retrieved meeting data.