METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR FAST METADATA GENERATION, DELIVERY AND ACCESS FOR LIVE BROADCAST PROGRAM

Techniques for fast indexing of live video broadcasts are provided which incorporate both efficient manual processing and automatic indexing steps to generate semantically meaningful and practically usable highlight hierarchy of broadcast television programs in real-time. In one technique, a list of predefined keywords is provided, describing the highlights, and the manual marking process can be implemented by just a few mouse clicks. A technique is provided for grouping highlights into a semantic hierarchy in real-time. A technique is provided for efficiently generating highlight metadata on live broadcast programs, using a coarse-to-fine indexing methodology in order for a operator to quickly generate highlight summaries of live broadcast programs.