Will Google TV owe Crestron Royalties for Universal Search?
By Julie Jacobson
Invention includes searching, prioritizing and playing video, audio and other content stored locally and in the cloud. Look out Google TV, Dish, TiVo and others?

The trouble with all this great content – movies, music, TV shows and more – is that you never know where it resides and how to find it and play it quickly. Do you have Shrek stored on a local NAS, for example? Or can you stream it from Netflix or buy it from iTunes?

Now there’s a patent application for that (#20110225156 by John Pavlik). Crestron Electronics, a leader in home automation and media distribution, has filed a patent for “Searching Two or More Media Sources for Media.” That’s a fancy way of saying “universal search.” (Clarification: The patent application was filed on March 12, 2010, and only published 18 months later, on Sept. 15, 2011, as is customary.)




Crestron worked on this technology -- they call it WorldSearch -- for a few years before finally shipping a product that implements it: The ADMS Intermedia Digital Media System (ADMS).

Debuting for $9,000 and now retailing for less than $5,000, the ADMS was dubbed by CE Pro as “The Ultimate Content Machine.”

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