DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM FOR LINKING CONTENT OF VIDEO SIGNALS TO INFORMATION SOURCES

A system for product advertising through a telecommunication network is disclosed. The system comprises an advertising engine and an information depot. The advertising engine comprises an information-extraction tool for acquiring product information, an authoring tool for tracking product images appearing in a display of a video recording, and an augmented-display tool for relating product images appearing in a display of a video recording to respective product information. The information depot comprises a global product directory and overlay directories for a set of video recordings. A number of authoring computers connect to the advertising engine of the present invention as well as streaming video sources and advertising databases to generate content of the information depot. The advertising engine distributes the augmented-display tool to viewers' computers which accesses the video-content directory and the product directory to acquire respective overlay directories and associated product data.