Systems and methods for recording multiple copies of a program are provided. The method may include receiving a user instruction to record a program. A determination may be made to record multiple copies of the program. In response to the determination, multiple copies of the program may be recorded. A user instruction to display the recorded program may be received. A copy of the program may be played back. The user may switch to another copy of the recorded program if the original copy lacks desirable recording attributes, or the interactive television application may automatically switch to another copy of the program.

Methods and systems for content aggregation and distribution are described. Video content may be received from a plurality of sources. The video content may be associated with metadata identifying items included within the video content. A video player may be provided which enables video content to be displayed on a user terminal, and a control may be provided enabling the user to quickly navigate to specific portions of the video content. A viewer of the video content may, in turn, author and provide additional video content. The video player may be embeddable.

An ad in a movie can be a static ad having a position in the movie that cannot be moved, or a dynamic ad having a position in the movie that can be changed. When a viewer wishes to skip a portion of the movie containing the ad, the playback system determines whether the ad is static or dynamic. If the ad is static, only the portion of the movie preceding the static ad can be skipped; the ad is unskippable. This technique is referred to as “bounceback” since the end of the skip bounces back to the start of the static ad. If the ad is dynamic, it is moved to after the end of the skip. This technique is referred to as “slip-ad” since the ad slips to later in the movie. When a movie has multiple ads, some can be static and some can be dynamic.

An interactive video distribution system and video player are described. A client server arrangement may be used for providing a video player and video content to a client device. The video player may display navigation images enabling navigation to specific portions of the video content by activating a corresponding navigation image. The video player may also enable the sharing of a segment of the video with other video players, enabling the video players to play the streamed segment of the video without having to play the entire video, thereby reducing network bandwidth usage. The video player may be embeddable. The server may associate searchable tags with respective video segments.

A computing system receives from a media presentation device a query fingerprint stream representing media content being presented by the media presentation device, where the query fingerprint stream has been determined to represent a first channel. The computing system then detects that a threshold mismatch exists between the received query fingerprint stream and a reference fingerprint stream representing the first channel, thus indicating a likelihood that the media presentation device has transitioned from presenting the first channel to presenting a second channel. Responsive to detecting the threshold mismatch, the system thus discontinues channel-specific action with respect to the first channel. For instance, the system could discontinue superimposing of first-channel-specific content on the presented media content and perhaps start superimposing of second-channel-specific content instead.

A method and apparatus of extracting a hot clip in a video, an electronic device, and a computer-readable storage medium are provided. The method includes: acquiring a video to be processed; filtering image frames with repeated content in the video to be processed, so as to obtain a simplified clip of the video to be processed; scoring each image frame in the simplified clip according to user viewing information associated with the video to be processed; and stitching image frames with scores meeting a preset condition sequentially to obtain a stitching result, and determining the stitching result as a hot clip of the video to be processed.

A video distribution system in one embodiment includes one or more computer processors. The one or more computer processors execute computer-readable instructions to distribute a video that includes an animation of a character object generated based on actor's behavior to a viewing user, and store actor information representing the actor's behavior and nonverbal feedback information representing nonverbal feedback about the video from the viewing user in association with a time code of the video. The nonverbal feedback information is detected by one or more user devices.

A method for customizing media content includes: receiving over a network from a client device controlled by a user, by a server-side computing device, a message or packet comprising stock media content received from a user, the message or packet further comprising customization preferences of the user obtained by the client-side customization application, the customized media content to be played by a client-side playback device in coordination with server-side playback of the stock media content by a server-side playback device; customizing the stock media content, by the server-side computing device, using the customization preferences of the user, so as to create customized media content; and streaming live over the network, by the server-side computing device, to the client device, the customized media content for playback by the client device that is substantially synchronized with playback by the server-side computing device of the stock media content.

Techniques are provided for associating comments with certain positions within a video (or audio) timeline. Multiple users compose comments, such as questions, and cause those comments to be stored in association with the video. Each comment is stored in association with a specific point or section in the video timeline. Later, another user can view the comments and select a particular comment, which causes the video to be played at the position in the timeline associated with the particular comment. Additionally or alternatively, playing a particular portion of a video may cause one or more comments that are associated with the particular portion to be displayed.

Systems and methods for providing user generated and curated video content streaming on-demand to facilitate and incentivize digital competition are provided. Information regarding challenges to be electronically displayed at a platform are associated with tags, and video clips uploaded in response which are associated with the tags of the challenge. The video clips are formatted and made available for electronic interaction by fans at the platform. Certain of said video clips are selected for incorporation into highlight reels. Advertising is inserted into the highlight reels and payments are disbursed to content generators associated with the video clips in the highlight reels for which payment is received.