ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 25 -- United States Patent no. 12,342,040, issued on June 24.
"Watermark-based dynamic ad insertion" was invented by Joseph M. Winograd (San Diego), Rade Petrovic (Fremont, Calif.), Jian Zhao (La Canada, Calif.) and Patrick George Downes (San Diego).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A watermark-based dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technique for presenting different users of content different advertisements based on the user's profile for content viewed on broadcast channels or in multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) channels. A number of solutions issues with watermark-based DAI are presented. Interoperability is addressed by providing a multiplexing technique so th...