Patent ID: 8059646

Claim:
A method of operating a peer device in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network for recommending media comprising: receiving, by the peer device, media recommendations from peer devices in the P2P network identifying media presentations recently played on the peer devices, the media recommendations comprising Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) of the media presentations recently played on the peer devices and being automatically sent by the peer devices in response to playback of the media presentations at the peer devices; comparing, by the peer device, the GUIDs from the media recommendations to GUIDs for a plurality of locally stored media presentations to determine whether each of the media presentations recently played on the peer devices is stored locally; scoring the media presentations at the peer device; obtaining, by the peer device, ones of the media presentations that are not stored locally and have a score greater than a predetermined threshold from a remote content source; obtaining, by the peer device, previews of other ones of the media presentations that are not stored locally and have a score less than the predetermined threshold but greater than a second predetermined threshold from the remote content source; automatically selecting, by the peer device, a media presentation to play from a group of media presentations including the media presentations identified by the media recommendations; automatically playing the media presentation selected to play if the media presentation is stored locally or has been obtained from the remote content source; and automatically playing the preview of the media presentation selected to play if the media presentation is not stored locally and the preview of the media presentation has been obtained from the remote content source.