Patent ID: 7277877

Claim:
A method of selecting content comprising: accessing content on a first channel; providing user profile information representing demographic information about a user that is not specific to the content; providing content-specific information, the content-specific information being associated with content available on a plurality of other channels, the content-specific information being not specific to the user; assigning a value to the plurality of channels based on the content-specific information and the demographic information; selecting one of the plurality of channels by comparing the values; switching access from the first channel to the selected channel; and playing the content on the selected channel; when there is a time gap between the end time of the content on the first channel and the start time of the content on the selected channel, selecting advertisement content for playing between the end of the content on the first channel and the start of the content on the selected channel, the advertisement content being selected according to the duration of the time gap.