Abstract: Metadata relating to advertisements in a television or other media stream can be automatically evaluated and filtered for more efficient ad replacement. A received media stream, for example, can be evaluated by an ad identification system or the like to identify advertisements, and to create an ad marker structure that describes the ad. The marker is ultimately provided to an ad replacement system that manages the actual replacement in streams delivered to individual viewers. In the meantime, however, the marker can be further evaluated to “pre-quality” the associated ad for replacement, to filter the ad marker so that the marker information is more accurate, or to create “pods” of consecutive replaceable ads.

Abstract: Systems, devices, and automated processes optimize bandwidth utilization in wireless network systems such as satellite systems, 5G and other cellular networks, and wireless local area networks with multiple distribution nodes. Redundant unicasts of media streams are replaced by multicasts that can be transmitted by a subset of the available distribution nodes. This allows customer devices to receive redundant content over shared bandwidth that is available to the particular customer devices requiring access to the redundant content. Subsets of distribution nodes can be selected for transmitting multi-casts, thereby further reducing the amount of system bandwidth needed to provide high-quality media streams to multiple customer devices operating within the wireless network system.

Abstract: An apparatus for adaptive-rate shifting of streaming content includes an agent controller module configured to simultaneously request at least portions of a plurality of streamlets. The agent controller module is further configured to continuously monitor streamlet requests and subsequent responses, and accordingly request higher or lower quality streamlets. A staging module is configured to stage the streamlets and arrange the streamlets for playback on a content player. A system includes a data communications network, a content server coupled to the data communications network and having a content module configured to process content and generate a plurality of high and low quality streams, and the apparatus.