MediaTile’s Patent Application
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Last year MediaTile filed a patent application entitled “APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR DISTRIBUTING AUDIOVISUAL CONTENT TO A POINT OF PURCHASE LOCATION” with the European Patent Office which we are told “claims priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/583,628, filed June 30, 2004, titled Method and Apparatus for Distributing Audiovisual Content Without On-Site Network Infrastructure“…
Publication number: EP1810233
Publication date: 2007-07-25
Inventor: KELSEN KEITH F (US); BINNS ROGER (US)
Applicant: MEDIATILE COMPANY (US)
Classification:
– international: G06Q30/00; G06Q30/00;
– European: G06Q30/00A
Application number: EP20050762265 20050615
Priority number(s): WO2005US21298 20050615; US20040583628P 20040630An advertising method for presenting an advertisement at a point of purchase includes transmitting advertising information from a server to a mobile telephone network; receiving the advertising information at the mobile telephone network; transmitting the advertising information from the mobile telephone network via a mobile telephone transmission to a display located at a point of purchase; receiving the mobile telephone transmission at the display; and playing an advertisement on the display based on the advertising information received by the display.
A number of digital signage vendors have, we believe, received letters from their legal team.
More detail at http://v3.espacenet.com/
August 5th, 2008 at 00:04 @044
They seem to be suggesting that there is no prior art in transmitting data to screens over mobile networks. Any system that uses IP (name one that doesn’t, these days!) would be perfectly ok unless the customer chose to send some of the IP data over a cell network, at which point you infringe. This is unworkable, surely?
August 5th, 2008 at 13:19 @596
Ridicoulous patent. This has been done in digital signage projects here in Europe and Scandinavia back to the earliest GSM phones with modem capapiblity in 1998-1999. Old News….
August 5th, 2008 at 13:33 @606
This is silly
August 7th, 2008 at 19:28 @853
Not only is there voluminous prior art (in the US at least), there is prior art for the EXACT application.
Imagicast was a bay area company in the late 1990’s that delivered advertising and promotional messages to digital signs over AT&T’s CDPD wireless network. They had deployments with Levi’s, CVS Drugs, Sams Club, Proctor and Gamble, and Albertsons (among others).
I don’t think anyone at Imagicast thought the basic notion of using a wireless network was new idea in 1998, but you can see that Imagicast holds several issued US patents that build on that basic principal, such as US Patent # 7168087. (although I hear one of that named inventors of that patent is of dubious intellect, ahem).
Take a walk in the wayback machine to look at Imagicasts website from 2000:
http://web.archive.org/web/20001204005100/www.imagicast.com/solution/solution_main.html