Patent ID: 8776109

Claim:
A method for handling disruption in content streams received at a player device from a content retransmitter, the method comprising: a player device monitoring bandwidth of a communication connection utilized to receive a first portion of content at the player device from the content retransmitter wherein the first portion of content is encoded at a first resolution level; the player device signaling the content retransmitter to encode a second portion of the content at a second resolution level when the player device determines that the bandwidth of the communication connection has decreased below a threshold value; the player device locating substitute content that is related to the first portion of the content by determining at least one characteristic of the content and selecting the substitute content by searching available content based on the at least one characteristic, wherein said operation of determining at least one characteristic of the content comprises at least one of: analyzing metadata describing the content, analyzing metadata included in the first portion of the content, analyzing captioning data for the first portion of the content, performing audio recognition on the first portion of the content, or performing image recognition on the first portion of the content; and the player device obtaining the substitute content to present instead of the second portion of the content when the second resolution level is below a minimum threshold resolution level.