Patent ID: 8321401

Claim:
A server for populating a user interface on a client device with available multimedia content from a plurality of servers, comprising: a computing device including, a network connection to connect to the Internet, a plurality of crawlers to access the plurality of servers over the network connection, and to automatically and repeatedly crawl the plurality of servers to identify and collect information about multimedia content that is available for delivery over the Internet to the client device for playback on a media player operating on the client device, wherein at least some of the plurality of servers are operated by different entities, and wherein at least some the information about the multimedia content on each of the plurality of servers is represented in different formats and according to different nomenclatures describing a content of the media content; and an index manager coupled to the plurality of crawlers and a data store, wherein the index manager includes, collection logic to receive the collected information from the plurality of crawlers; normalization logic to convert the different formats of the collected information into a common format and to convert the different nomenclatures describing the content of the media content into a common nomenclature; index logic to update an index of the available multimedia content with the normalized information; and user interface logic coupled to the data store and the client device, the user interface logic to send a data feed to the client device to populate the user interface on the client device with the normalized information of the index, wherein the user interface allows a user to navigate and select the multimedia content that is available for delivery over the Internet for playback on the media player operating on the client device.