Patent ID: 8196045

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a moving thumbnail generator hosted on a server to generate one or more moving thumbnails that are tagged and time-stamped to arbitrary video trigger events that take place in an associated original video file, wherein each of the moving thumbnails comprises two or more frames derived from its associated original video file at a portion in the original video file that is tagged and time-stamped to one or more relevant video trigger events in order for the generated moving thumbnail to summarize a visual content of the associated original video file to a viewer on a display screen of a client device and a tag included with the moving thumbnail carries information about content that takes place in the original video file and metadata about that content including a time reference to frames that are contextually relevant to a reason why the viewer of the moving thumbnail might be interested in viewing the original video file, and wherein each moving thumbnail has a relational link back to the original video file associated with the moving thumbnail that can be used to retrieve the original video file, where the moving thumbnails comprising two or more frames derived from its associated original video file are images displayed within the thumbnail's coordinates on the display screen and the images progress through a sequence of images over time within the same coordinates on the display screen, wherein a comparator is used to compare the moving thumbnails with the tagged and time-stamped arbitrary video trigger events that take place in the associated original video file to a reason why the viewer of the moving thumbnail might be interested in viewing the original video file in order to return as a search result the moving thumbnails having frames of content that are contextually relevant to the reason why the viewer of the moving thumbnail might be interested in viewing the original video file, where the moving thumbnail is configured to cooperate with a data store that contains multiple instances of the moving thumbnail for each original video file.