US 6,687,908 B1 · Interactive television

Abstract

An interactive television system for selectively retrieving video images or teletext pages from a remote transmitter (1). User requests are communicated to the transmitter through the telephone network (5). The selected images (e.g. teletext pages) are provided with an image address (a personal teletext page number) and transmitted through a broadcast medium (4). A broadcast receiver (6) captures, stores and displays images having a particular address in a further autonomous manner. In order to prevent co-viewers from tracing the image address and thus watching personal information intended for an individual user on their broadcast receivers (3), the service provider sends a control command (the teletext “stop” command) to the receiver through the network whenever a new image has been transmitted. Then, the provider broadcasts a different image having the same image address. In view of the stop command, the individual receiver will ignore this “pseudo-image” while this image will.

Claims4

Dependent claims

A method of transmitting images from a transmitter to an individual receiver, comprising the steps;

establishing a communication path between said individual receiver and the transmitter to obtain user selections identifying the images to be transmitted;
assigning an image address to the images to be transmitted;
and
broadcasting each image along with said image address through a broadcast medium;
the method further comprises the steps:
transmitting, after broadcasting each image, a control command through the communication path to control the individual receiver to refrain from receiving further images;
and
subsequently transmitting, through the broadcast medium, a different image having the same image address.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Interactive television

Life of this patent

Interactive television

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims4