Patent ID: 8296808

Claim:
A method of acquiring data associated with a television program, comprising: acquiring information that identifies a currently playing television program playing on a television, the acquiring comprising: the television sending one or more commands to an external access device to cause the access device to produce video signals representing an electronic program guide (EPG); optical character reader processing one or more video signals representing video images of the electronic program guide provided by the access device, where the access device generates the EPG by direct access to EPG metadata and where the television does not have direct access to the EPG metadata used by the access device to generate the EPG except via video signals, generating an alternate EPG for use by the television by reformatting the results of the OCR process, and identifying the currently playing content by reference to the alternate EPG; receiving a command from a user interface that selects an image forming a portion of a frame of video displayed on the television, where said frame of video is a portion of the television program; accessing a specified web site that contains a database of metadata associated with television programs via the Internet; querying the specified web site for metadata associated with the image by providing the image along with the information that identifies the currently playing television program to the web site; receiving a response from the specified web site that provides metadata associated with the image; and displaying at least a portion of the metadata.