Patent ID: 8271676

Claim:
A content system, comprising: an active play unit being associated with a corpus of pieces of content, the active play unit further comprising an active play content store that stores data about each of a plurality of pieces of content associated with the active play unit, the data further comprising an identifier of a location in a piece of content at which a playing of the piece of content was halted; one or more content devices that can connect to the active play unit over a link, wherein each of the one or more content devices is configured to: query the active play unit if the piece of content is stored in the active play unit; download, if the piece of content is stored in the active play unit, the location identifier to the content device; download, if the piece of content is not stored in the active play unit, the piece of content into the active play unit and storing data about the location identifier as data into the active play unit; and each content device having an active play module that allows a particular piece of content to be played on each content device in a format appropriate for the content device wherein the particular piece of content is played, using the location identifier, at a location at which the playing of the particular piece of content was halted on another content device; wherein the active play unit is configured to reformat the particular piece of content for each content device where the particular piece of content is played.