SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETECTING REPEATING CONTENT, INCLUDING COMMERCIALS, IN A VIDEO DATA STREAM

Methods and apparatus are provided for detecting potential repeating content, such as commercials, in a video data stream by receiving one or more video data streams, parsing each video data stream into a plurality of segments, creating a representation of each segment such as a segment fingerprint, storing the plurality of segment representations in a database, and identifying any segment representations in the received and parsed one or more video data streams that match segment representations in the database that were previously stored from video data streams that were previously received and parsed.