Fast play: a novel feature for digital consumer video devices

The advent of digital devices with innovative features has changed the world of home video entertainment. Nowadays we have access to devices that store several hours of video material, skip commercials, and even pause the play out of a live event. Despite these innovative features, modern digital devices access to recorded material in a way very similar to old analog VCRs. In this paper we propose Fast Play, a mechanism that uses simple low-level audio and video analysis to provide a novel feature in digital video devices. This novel feature is a hybrid between the classic Play service and the Fast-Forward service, and aims at playing out videos in a time-reduced manner, by maintaining the time evolving nature of the original video, and by providing videos with completely intelligible audio. An experimental assessment shows that Fast Play produces videos that are informative, enjoyable, largely reduced, and also shows that users really appreciate the Fast Play feature as it produces a pleasant surrogate of the original video.