Patent ID: 8863164

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, by a server, metadata associated with an advertisement in a transport signal stream from an encoder, the metadata comprising a first frame rate of the transport signal stream and a second frame rate of the transport signal stream; retrieving, by the server from a data store, a first marker corresponding to a first total percentage of an advertisement playable by a smart appliance at the first frame rate; retrieving, by the server from the data store, a second marker corresponding to the first total percentage of the advertisement playable by the smart appliance at the second frame rate, wherein the first marker and the second marker are unique across frame rates, and wherein, prior to retrieving the first marker and retrieving the second marker, the server groups the first marker and the second marker together in the data store for identifying the same total percentage of the advertisement playable by the smart appliance; instructing the encoder, by the server, to insert the first marker into a first specified frame of a transport signal stream, the first marker identifying a first point in time of an advertisement; instructing the encoder, by the server, to insert the second marker into a second specified frame of a transport signal stream, the second marker identifying the first point in time of the advertisement; receiving, by the server, data from the smart appliance; when the server detects the first marker in the data, identifying, by the server in the data store, the first marker as the first specified frame of the transport signal stream played by the smart appliance at the first frame rate; mapping, by the server, the first marker to the first total percentage of the advertisement played by the smart appliance at the first frame rate in view of the first point in time in the transport signal stream identified by the first marker; and reporting, by the server, the first total percentage of the advertisement played by the smart appliance at the first frame rate to a tracking element; when the server detects the second marker in the data, identifying, by the server in the data store, the second marker as the second specified frame of the transport signal stream played by the smart appliance at the second frame rate; mapping, by the server, the second marker to the first total percentage of the advertisement played by the smart appliance at the second frame rate in view of the second point in time in the transport signal stream identified by the second marker; and reporting, by the server, the first total percentage of the advertisement played by the smart appliance at the second frame rate to the tracking element, wherein, prior to retrieving the first marker and retrieving the second marker, the server instructs the encoder to transmit code to the smart appliance to permit the smart appliance to detect the first marker and the second marker and to permit the smart appliance to report the first marker and the second marker.