US 11,736,746 B2
Use of steganographically-encoded time information as basis to establish a time offset, to facilitate taking content-related action
Benjamin J. Ropke, Rochelle, NY (US); John S. Stavropoulos, Edison, NY (US); and Shashank C. Merchant, Sunnyvale, CA (US)
Assigned to The Nielsen Company (US), LLC, New York, NY (US)
Filed by The Nielsen Company (US), LLC, New York, NY (US)
Filed on Sep. 7, 2022, as Appl. No. 17/930,254.
Application 17/930,254 is a continuation of application No. 17/302,843, filed on May 13, 2021, granted, now 11,470,364.
Application 17/302,843 is a continuation of application No. 15/929,220, filed on Feb. 6, 2020, granted, now 11,051,057, issued on Jun. 29, 2021.
Claims priority of provisional application 62/865,607, filed on Jun. 24, 2019.
Prior Publication US 2023/0007320 A1, Jan. 5, 2023
This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.
Int. Cl. H04N 21/234 (2011.01); H04N 21/44 (2011.01); H04N 21/845 (2011.01); H04N 21/8358 (2011.01); G06T 1/00 (2006.01); H04N 21/2389 (2011.01); H04N 21/81 (2011.01); H04N 21/8547 (2011.01)
CPC H04N 21/23424 (2013.01) [G06T 1/0085 (2013.01); H04N 21/23892 (2013.01); H04N 21/44008 (2013.01); H04N 21/44016 (2013.01); H04N 21/812 (2013.01); H04N 21/8358 (2013.01); H04N 21/8456 (2013.01); H04N 21/8547 (2013.01)] 20 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method operable while a client is processing one or more linear media streams for presentation, each of the one or more linear media streams defining a respective time sequence of frames of media content, and at least one of the linear media streams being steganographically encoded with at least one watermark at a respective time-point within linear media stream, the watermark encoding a timestamp of the respective time-point within the linear media stream according to a server clock, the method comprising:
extracting the timestamp from the watermark,
computing a time offset based on a difference between the extracted timestamp and a current time according to a client clock, and
using the computed time offset as a basis to determine when the client should carry out a content-related action in a given one of the one or more linear media streams.