AT&T Awarded Patents on Internet Protocol Television Services

Headquartered in the Whitacre Tower in downtown Dallas, TX, AT&T is one of the world’s largest providers of telephony services. In an effort to make AT&T data plans more attractive to consumers, the company recently rolled out a sponsored data plan that would allow advertisers to offer content that doesn’t count against the plan’s total data usage. The corporation has also been working with General Motors to design Internet-enabled cars through which a user can subscribe to an AT&T data plan.

Mobile electronic devices have been at the center of the consumer technology world for some years now, making AT&T a regular feature here on our Companies We Follow series. As always, we at IPWatchdog have gone through and selected our favorite patent applications and issued patents published recently by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. With AT&T, our readers can get a good idea of the future of mobile telephone services as well as a few other systems of digital communication.

Today’s featured patent application discusses a system of making mobile device communication more effective between parties. This application would protect a system that can analyze a device owner’s communication habits and then suggest to other people whether they’ll have a better chance reaching a contact through a phone call or a text. Other patent applications we discovered today include a system of using wireless devices to communicate with fitness equipment during a workout, as well as methods of estimating a crowd size by surveying mobile devices in the vicinity.

Issued patents are a huge part of our focus here at IPWatchdog, and it intrigues us that AT&T, usually involved with telephone systems and other forms of communications innovations, would be so interested in IPTV and television services. But a trio of patents included here suggest AT&T is itself intrigued with innovations in the delivery of TV. We also discuss a patent used to track media content shared over peer-to-peer and ad-hoc networks as well as improvements to IT security infrastructures that improves the accuracy of security data.

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Method for Generating Recommended Changes to Communication Behaviors
U.S. Patent Application No. 20140006591

Still a novelty item as recently as twenty years ago, mobile phones are owned by a very wide swath of global consumers. The Pew Research Center reported in June 2013 that 91 percent of American adults own and use a cell phone. That’s millions of individuals interacting every day on electronic devices. With the spread of smartphones and tablet computers, there are a number of other communication technologies easily available to consumers, including e-mail, text and video conferencing.

With so many options available, people may find that they enjoy texting their contacts more than calling them on the phone, or vice versa. They may also like to speak to friends while only communicating with professional contacts via e-mail. However, it may be difficult to reach a contact if a person is not attempting to make contact over any of their preferred channels. For instance, maybe the friend you’re trying to call only has the ability to respond to texts at the moment.

This patent application has been filed with the USPTO by AT&T to protect a system of analyzing device owner communication patterns to find out the best way to reach that contact. This system can extract network communications data for users about their usage of telephone, e-mail, social networking and other communication services. In response to a trigger event, the system will return recommendations about the best method for reaching the contact at that time.

This system can further suggest that a person attempting to reach a contact should sign up for a particular communication or social networking service that the first user doesn’t have. For instance, if the system sees that a person doesn’t respond to text messages but is good about responding to Facebook contacts, the system might suggest using that means of messaging. The recommendation system could even suggest data plan changes that can make their communication more cost-effective, based on the communication preferences of their main contacts.

Claim 1 of this AT&T patent application would provide protections over:

“A method for generating a recommended change to a communication behavior of a first user of a network, the method comprising: identifying, by an application server, a communication pattern in accordance with data extracted from communications collected in the network, wherein the data is associated with at least one of the first user and an endpoint other than the first user; and generating the recommended change to the communication behavior of the first user based on the communication pattern.”

Other Patent Applications

AT&T is a major developer of mobile device technologies, and we’re seeing a number of other patent applications that discuss better methods of communicating data between devices. For example, it would be very beneficial for smartphone users to be able to add contacts without having to manually input names and phone numbers. U.S. Patent Application No. 20140012920, entitled Device, System and Method for Recording Personal Encounter History, would protect a system of one device identifying another local device and obtaining contact information from it. As the patent’s description section interestingly states, “Life is meeting people, making contacts and developing personal relationships,” and AT&T hopes that this innovation should make life easier in those respects. U.S. Patent Application No. 20140012630, which is titled Surveying Wireless Device Users by Location, describes another development enabling a novel system of communicating with mobile devices. This system would use wireless communication networks to obtain location information for individual users, providing a more accurate system of crowd estimation at events than current methods.

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A couple of other patent applications that we’ve delved into a bit more deeply this week pertain to mobile device apps. Creating more helpful methods of ranking software applications is the goal of U.S. Patent Application No. 20140006418, titled Method and Apparatus for Ranking Apps in the Wide-Open Internet. This system uses meta-data application to the thousands of applications available on smartphone networks to improve app search results. Those who maintain a disciplined workout regimen may be able to improve their exercising habits thanks to U.S. Patent Application No. 20140005811, filed under the title Fitness Applications of a Wireless Device. This system allows exercise equipment to send information directly to a wireless device for fitness analysis of heart rate, exercise regimen and more.

From U.S. Patent Application No. 20140005811, titled “Fitness Applications of a Wireless Device.”

Issued Patents of Note

Figure 1 of U.S. Patent No. 8,627,399, which is titled “System and Method of Delivering Television Content.”

The USPTO has also been busy issuing patents to this American corporation, many of which are related to the various mobile device and smartphone options available through the manufacturer. As always, we make sure to profile an interesting assortment of issued patents here in our Companies We Follow series. Today, we’re making sure to explore the best patents issued to AT&T recently.

In recent weeks we’ve noticed a spike in innovations related to television services and Internet protocol television, or IPTV, systems. That trend continues for AT&T as illustrated, for example, in U.S. Patent No. 8627371, entitled System and Method of Applying User Profiles at a Set-Top Box Device. This patent protects a system that enables users of a set-top box, which includes the television tuner and outputs, to create personal profiles through the box. These profiles would enable users to interact with commonly used systems and settings and skip unused ones. U.S. Patent No. 8627399, which is titled System and Method of Delivering Television Content, allows content to be transmitted from a set-top box to a second device. We also noticed U.S. Patent No. 8627380, filed under the title System and Method for an Interactive Internet Radio Application in an Internet Protocol Television System, provides for a radio interface on IPTV applications. It should be noted that each of these has a lengthy Claims 1 section, which may reduce the value of these individual patents.

AT&T has also been very involved with developments to IT infrastructures for businesses to judge by other patents issued recently. For instance, U.S. Patent No. 8624720, which is titled Security Infrastructure, protects improvements in providing accurate data to security agents who are charged with maintaining the safety of a technological infrastructure for a business or organization. Finally, we took a look at U.S. Patent No. 8621066, entitled Apparatus for Tracking the Distribution of Media Content, which discusses better means of tracking users who are involved in peer-to-peer or ad-hoc file distribution systems.