Patent ID: 7685616

Claim:
A method for processing control events, the method comprising: receiving a first control event; partially processing the first control event to provide feedback indicating that the first control event has been received, wherein the partially processing comprises displaying a thumbnail image from a stream associated with processing the first control event, wherein each thumbnail image is reduced in size from an original size of each respective stream; receiving a second control event within a predetermined period of time of the first control event, wherein the first control event and the second control event correspond to two successive control requests issued in a media presentation system within the predetermined period of time; and aggregate-processing the first control event and the second control event together as a coalesced control event to provide a combined instruction, wherein the aggregate-processing of the first control event and the second control event together as a coalesced control event incurs a lower latency compared to separate processing of the first control event and the second control event, wherein the aggregate-processing comprises: omitting at least one operation that would be performed if the first control event was processed separately from the second control event; prompting the media presentation system with the first control request to switch from a first stream to a second stream; prompting the media presentation system with the second control request to switch from the second stream to a third stream; and determining a strategy for transitioning from an initial control state to a final control state in the coalesced control event, wherein the strategy for transitioning comprises: implementing a jitter buffer on a first-in-first-out (FIFO) basis where the jitter buffer stores content information from the first stream and the second stream, the media presentation system drawing from the jitter buffer when it presents the content information during transitioning; implementing a rate filter to reduce the bit rate of the streaming content when available network bandwidth drops; and inserting boundary information at every break between streams.