Concurrent serving of a media stream
AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC
InventorsDanny Levin, Bradford R. Clark, Amer Hassan
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Online content is served to participant devices using two or more systems. The content served by each system is not the same. Rather, the content streams coming from each system is a partial or lower-quality version of the original high-quality version of the content stream. A single one of the partial data streams can be used by the participant device to output a lower-quality version of the original content stream to the user. Alternately, the received partial content streams can be combined to output, to the user, a high-quality version of the original content stream.
Claims20
A communication system, comprising:
- a first server having a plurality of user devices linked to one another via the first server wherein the plurality of user devices share a media stream, the media stream including at least a first partial media stream and a second partial media stream, first partial media stream being different from the second partial media stream, the first server sending, to the plurality of user devices, the first partial media stream;
- and,
- a second server having the plurality of users linked to one another via the second server, the second server sending, to the plurality of user devices, the second partial media stream.
A method of operating a communication system, comprising:
- linking a plurality of user devices to one another via a first server, wherein the plurality of user devices are to share a media stream;
- linking the plurality of user devices to one another via a second server;
- sending, from the first server and to the plurality of user devices, a first partial version of the media stream;
- sending, from the second server and to the plurality of user devices, a second partial version of the media stream;
- receiving, by at least a first user device of the plurality of user devices, a first portion of the first partial version and a second portion of the second partial version;
- and,
- combining, by the first user device, the first portion and the second portion to output to a user a version of the media stream.
A method of operating a user device linked to a communication system, comprising:
- receiving, from a first server linking a plurality of user devices to one another, a first partial version of a media stream;
- receiving, from a second server, a second partial version of the media stream;
- and,
- using at least one of the first partial version and the second partial version to output a version of the media stream.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.