WO2016140619A1

WO2016140619A1 - Method and system for providing selecting products

Info

Publication number: WO2016140619A1
Application number: PCT/SG2015/000067
Authority: WO
Inventors: Weng Wah Chng; Ching Yau KANG
Original assignee: Citrine Wireless Pte Ltd
Priority date: 2015-03-05
Filing date: 2015-03-05
Publication date: 2016-09-09

Abstract

A method is proposed for selecting products for purchase using a mobile device having a touch-sensitive screen for viewing video content. When a user of the device touches the touch sensitive screen at a time when a product is being featured in the video display, that touch is recognized and used to initiate a process in which information relating to the product is extracted from a database, and used to initiate a payment procedure, such as by putting the product into a shopping cart, for purchase either immediately or following a subsequent "check-out" procedure. In addition to the time at which the touch was made, the method may use also the location on the screen to find a matching product.

Description

Method and system for providing selecting products Field of the invention

The present invention relates to methods and systems for initiating a payment process for a product, such as by putting the product into a shopping card of an online merchant. Background of the invention

Much television advertising includes displaying contact information explaining where viewers of the television channel can place an order, using a separate telecommunication system. For example, many products are advertised at the same time as text is displayed, giving a telephone number which viewers may use to place an order. However, in other video content including an image of a product, it is not be so clear how to make a purchase. For example, many movies feature an expensive product such as a watch worn by a character of the movie. Although the name of the maker of the product may be visible, the viewer is not told the name of the product or exactly where to purchase it.

Summary of the invention The present invention aims to provide new and useful ways for consumers to obtain information in relation to products which are being displayed on a screen, and in particular to initiate a purchase process for the product.

In general terms, the invention proposes selecting products for purchase using a mobile device having a touch-sensitive screen for viewing video content. When a user of the device touches the touch sensitive screen at a time when a product is being featured in the video display, that touch is recognized and used to initiate an automatic process in which information relating to the product is extracted from a database, and used to initiate a payment procedure, such as by putting the product into a shopping cart, for purchase either immediately or following a subsequent "check-out" procedure. In one embodiment of the invention, additionally, the position on the screen of the touch is used to determine which product is being indicated. For example, if a touch contact is made at a time when multiple products are being displayed on the screen, the position information can identify one of those products. The term "location" is used in this document to refer to a position on a screen of the mobile device, such as a position described by x- and y-coordinates.

The invention may be expressed as a method, or as a computer apparatus for performing a method, such as a general purpose computer having a database for storing video content for steaming, and also data showing the times (and optionally locations) at which products are included in the video content.

The method is preferably performed automatically, that is to say without human

involvement except for the initiation of the playing of the video, the touch itself, and, optionally, human involvement in a payment process of products in the cart.

Brief description of the drawings

An embodiment of the invention will now be described for the sake of example only with reference to the following figures, in which:

Fig. 1 shows schematically an embodiment of the invention; Fig. 2 shows a screen displayed in the operation of the embodiment;

Fig. 3 shows a portion of a database in the embodiment of Fig. 1; and

Fig. 4 shows steps in a method performed by the embodiment.

Detailed description of the embodiments

Fig. 1 shows a first embodiment of the invention which in which a user employs a mobile device 101 (e.g. a tablet or smartphone) having a touch-sensitive screen. The mobile device 101 runs an application ("app") which downloads videos from a server 102 ("content provider") over a wireless communications network 103 (a WiFi network or

telecommunication network, such as a 3G network, for example). The communications network 103 is typically implemented by a hub 104 (such as a router, in the case that network 103 is a WiFi network; or the server of a broadcasting system if the network 103 is a mobile telephone system) which controls an aerial 105. The hub 104 communicates with the server 102 over the internet 106.

The videos are stored in a database 107 which is accessed by the server 102, which then streams the video to the mobile device 101 via the wireless communications network 103 and the internet 106.

Typically, the video contains references to products (a term which is used here to mainly refer to physical products, although other products are possible also, such as digital products or even services). At any given time, the video may include information associated with one or more products. For example, the video may be series of video advertisements for a respective plurality of different products. Substantially all of the video content may be adverts, Alternatively, only a portion of the video production may be advertising content. For example, the video may be a movie in which product placement occurs at a certain set of moments.

When a user sees on the screen a product which he or she might be interested in purchasing, he touches the screen. This causes a command to be sent, via the communications network 103 and the internet 106, to the server 102.

A mechanism exists for the server (or in some embodiments the mobile device 101) to determine the time position within the video track corresponding to the time at which the touch was made. A first way of doing this is for the mobile device 101 to directly capture the time when the touch is made relative to a time-signal encoded within the video signal received by the mobile device 101, e.g. indicating how much of the video has already been displayed by the mobile device 101.

An alternative way of doing this is by determining the time that the contact was made according to a reference clock, and using a separate table (typically stored in the server 101) showing what content was being delivered to the mobile device 101 at any time according to that reference clock. In a first case, the reference clock may be an internal clock of the mobile device. The clock may be synchronized with a clock running in the server 102 (for example, using the packets of data being transmitted over the network 101; or by both the mobile device 101 and the server 102 independently synchronizing themselves with a clock in another place, for example in the cloud. In a second case, the server 102 may record the time at which the command signal from the mobile device 101 was received, according to the internal clock of the server 102.

Furthermore, the mobile device 101 encodes the location on the screen at which the touch was made, and generates and transmits to the server 102 data describing this in the command.

Note that the location data is typically in relation to x- and y-axes which specify picture positions within a frame of the video content as it is displayed. For example, the origin of the axes might be a lower-left corner of each frame of the video, and the location of a given feature in the frame might be specified in terms of the proportion of the frame dimensions that the point is away from that origin. Thus, if the mobile device 101 is turned over, and the mobile device is configured to alter how the video is displayed such that the user still sees the video in the correct orientation (i.e. the lower-left of each frame is still in the lower-left of the screen as seen by the user), then the axes would move relative to the screen, but not relative to the video content. In other words, the location format is in a format such that a given product is displayed in the video in a position which has the same location data irrespective of which way up the mobile device 101 is. The database 107 further includes a table such as the one shown in Fig. 3. For each of a .. number of products which feature in the video, the table of Fig. 3 shows the time in the video at which it first appears ("duration start") and the time in the video at which it disappears ("duration end"), and the position on the screen where the product is shown. The last item of each row of the table is product identity data describing the product (in Fig. 3, names are given, but more usually a code number is given here).

The steps of a method according to the invention are shown in Fig. 4. The method starts at a time at which the user is watching a video on the app, using video content downloaded from the server 102 by the app. In step 1, a user taps on the image of a product within a video. In step 2, the time of the tap is determined, as a position within the video track. In step 3, the location on the screen of the mobile device 101 at which the tap was made is recorded. Steps 2 and 3 are performed by the mobile device, following program instructions which are part of the app, which may then generate a message to the server 102 which contains data indicative of the time position of the tap within the video track (as explained above, this data may be an explicit position relative to the time of the video track, or it may encode a time according to the reference clock). The subsequent steps of the method are then performed by the server 102.

In step 4, the recorded time and location are compared to the table of Fig. 3.

If a match is found (i.e. the answer to step 5 is 'y^es')_/ the method passes to step 6 in which the system identifies if there are multiple matches. If not (i.e. the answer to step 6 is 'no'), the product identity data from the only match is used (step 7) to place the item into a shopping cart associated with the user of the mobile device 101. This shopping cart may be stored on the server 102. Alternatively, the server 102 may send a command including the product identity data to a separate merchant 108 over the internet 106. The merchant 108 uses the product identity data and its own database 109 to place the product in a shopping cart maintained on the merchant 108.

If the answer to step 6 is 'yes', then the system uses the location data to identify (in step 8) which of the two matches the user was indicating. For example, suppose that the touch was at a time .50 min, This may match two rows of the table of Fig. 4. However, suppose that the touch was recorded to be at position x=4.5, y=3.5 on the screen. It may be that only one of the two rows has a corresponding position. Thus, the system determines that the selected product is the one from that row, and in step 9 the corresponding product is placed in the shopping cart.

Following step 7 or step 9, the purchase of the product may be automatic (so, in effect, there is a one-click purchase, in which the one click is the user's touch on the screen of the mobile device 101). Alternatively, the product may be saved in the cart until there is a separate check-out procedure, e.g. after the display of the video.

If no match is found in step 4 (i.e. the answer to step 5 is 'no'), then in step 8, the time and location data for the touch are used to cut an image out of the video. The image may for example be a window (e.g. of predetermined dimensions) which is part of a frame of the video which was displayed at (or within a predetermined short time away from) the time that the screen was touched. The window is selected based on the location of the touch, e.g. it contains the location at which the touch occurred. This image may be displayed in the cart, to show an item not available, and/or a message may be sent to the user to say that there was no match.

Optionally, the image can be used by the content provider or merchant to offer other, similar merchandise to the user. An image recognition process may be applied to the image, to identify of products from a database of products (e.g. of available third party products) to find a match to propose to the user, e.g. when the user consults the shopping cart.

In a variation of the process above, the database of Fig. 3 may be included in the mobile device (e.g. as a portion of the app), so that steps 4-9 are performed by the app. Steps 7 and 9 may in this case comprise the app sending a message to the server 102 and/or the merchant 108, instructing the identified product to be put into the cart. Optionally, this step may be performed only after the user has given an explicit approval, in which case the check-out may be automatic. Storing the database on the mobile device 101 makes it possible to provide a quicker way of letting the user have their products information.

The databases 107 and 109 are illustrated in Fig. 1 as being physically proximate the servers 102, 108, but this is not a requirement. Either may instead by part of the cloud. Further, the databases 107, 109 may be made up of sub-databases, any one or more of which may be on the cloud.

Claims

1. A method of obtaining from a user a selection of a product, the method comprising: streaming a video to a user over a wireless communication network to screen of a mobile device associated with the user, the screen being touch sensitive; receiving input from the user indicating a touch on the screen during the display of the video; determining a time position within the video corresponding to the touch; accessing a database which for each of a plurality of products, specifies one or more corresponding times within the video at which the product was displayed, and corresponding product identity data, obtaining at least one match between the time position and a time in the table; using the corresponding product identity data from the at least one match, to place a corresponding product into a product purchase cart.

2. A method according to claim 1, further including determining a location on the screen at which the touch was made, the database further containing for each of the products, location data specifying a location on the screen at which the product was displayed, and the method further including determining, for each of said matches, a location match between the location data and the location at which the touch was made, and using the corresponding product identity data from the at least one location match, to place a corresponding product into the product purchase cart.

3. A method according to claim 1 or claim 2 which, in the absence of a said match, includes a further step of attempting to seeking matches between an image obtained from the video at the time and location corresponding to the touch, and a database of products, and in the case that such a match is found, suggesting the matching product to the user.

4. A server system, the server comprising: a processor; an interface; and a database, the database storing (i) video data, and (ii) a table which for each of a plurality of products, specifies one or more corresponding times within the video at which the product was displayed, and corresponding product identity data, the processor being arranged to steam the video data to a screen of a touch sensitive device over a wireless communication system, to receive data indicating a time position within the video at which a user touched the screen; to obtain at least one match between the time position and a time in the table; and to use the corresponding product identity data from the at least one match, to place a corresponding product into a product purchase cart.

5. A server system according to claim 4, the database further containing for each of the products, location data specifying a location on the screen at which the product was displayed; and the processor further being arranged : to receive data determining, for each of said matches, a location match between the location data and the location at which the touch was made, and to use the corresponding product identity data from the at least one location match, to place a corresponding product into the product purchase cart.

6; A computer program product, comprising program instructions operative, when run by the processor of a mobile device having a touch-sensitive screen, to cause the mobile device to: interact with a user of the mobile device to cause the mobile device to communicate with a server over a communications network, to download a video, display the video on the screen; receive input from the user indicating a touch on the screen during the display of the video; transmit out of the mobile device a message indicative of the time position within the video at which the touch occurred, whereby a recipient of the message is able to access a database which for each of a plurality of products, specifies one or more corresponding times within the video at which the product was displayed, and corresponding product identity data, obtain at least one match between the time position and a time in the table, and use the corresponding product identity data from the at least one match, to place a corresponding product into a product purchase cart.

7. A computer program product, comprising program instructions operative, when run by the processor of a mobile device having a touch-sensitive screen, to cause the mobile device to: interact with a user of the mobile device to cause the mobile device to communicate with a server over a communications network, to download a video, display the video on the screen; receive input from the user indicating a touch on the screen during the display of the video; access a database which for each of a plurality of products, specifies one or more corresponding times .within the video at which the product was displayed, and

corresponding product identity data, obtain at least one match between the time position and a time in the table; and use the corresponding product identity data from the at least one match, to place a corresponding product into a product purchase cart.