An intelligent electronic appliance preferably includes a user interface,
data input and/or output port, and an intelligent processor. A preferred
embodiment comprises a set top box for interacting with broadband media
streams, with an adaptive user interface, content-based media processing
and/or media metadata processing, and telecommunications integration. An
adaptive user interface models the user, by observation, feedback, and/or
explicit input, and presents a user interface and/or executes functions
based on the user model. A content-based media processing system analyzes
media content, for example audio and video, to understand the content, for
example to generate content-descriptive metadata. A media metadata
processing system operates on locally or remotely generated metadata to
process the media in accordance with the metadata, which may be, for
example, an electronic program guide, MPEG 7 data, and/or automatically
generated format. A set top box preferably includes digital trick play
effects, and incorporated digital rights management features.
