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Module manager for interactive television system
| Details |
Inventors: Goodman, Andrew; Menand, Jean Rene;
Assignee: OpenTV, Inc. (San Francisco, CA)
Primary Examiner: Tran; Hai
Assistant Examiner: Huynh; Son P.
Attorney, Agent or Firm: Meyertons Hood Kivlin Kower & Goetzel, P.C., Rankin; Rory D.
A system and method implemented in an interactive television system for managing modules of interactive television applications. The system transmits modules from a broadcast station to a plurality of receiving stations through various paths, such as broadcast channels and modem channels. The receiving stations have module managers which store module requests and which monitor the various channels for modules corresponding to the requests. When modules are transmitted on the monitored channels, they are matched with the corresponding stored requests. If a module matches one of the requests, or if is an auto-loading module, it is stored in the receiving station. If a module has not been requested and is not an auto-loading module, it is ignored. The stored modules are added to a list of modules available for execution or for use by an executing application, and the corresponding requests are deleted. |
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DETAILED DESCRIPTION One of the advantages of designing software applications in a modular fashion is the ability to share modules between applications.
The advantages of modularity may include conserving the limited amount of memory in a set-top box which can be used for interactive applications, reducing the time required to download applications from a broadcast station to a set-top box and reducing the amount of application code which must be written by allowing modules to be shared.
The components of an application, however, may reside in different carousels (sets of modules, as described in more detail below) or in modules which may not be available at the time the application begins execution.
It is therefore desirable to implement a system for management of the different modules.
It would be advantageous for this management system to be capable of handling modules which have not yet been received and which may have to be extracted from an interactive television signal.
Further, it would be advantageous for this management system to be capable of simultaneously monitoring several sources (e.
g.
, a broadcast channel and a modem channel) for the modules needed by an application.
The invention comprises a system and method for managing modules of interactive television applications.
One embodiment of the invention includes a set-top box configured with several input ports for receiving one or more interactive television signals which may embody the carousel modules.
The interactive television signals typically comprise packets of compressed data corresponding to modules of an interactive television application, television programs, or other interactive television data.
("Television program" as used herein refers generally to any type of audio and/or video programming which is normally viewed on a television.
) The various types of packets are generally time multiplexed with each other.
The set-top box monitors the input ports to determine whether a packet received at the input port contains module data and, if so, whether the module should be processed and stored in the set-top box
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