FIELD OF THE INVENTION

Aspects of the present invention relate to (a) the distribution of content (e.g., audiovisual media content) from various sources to people using transportable memory devices and also to (b) techniques for deriving revenue in connection with the distribution of such content using such devices.

BACKGROUND

The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.

An abundance of digitized audio and video content is accessible through various sites on the Internet using a browser application such as Mozilla Firefox. A user can direct his browser application to the uniform resource locator (URL) of a web site and click on a link to view a movie or listen to music. If the user wishes to view the movie or listen to the music at a later time, the user can instruct his browser application to download the data to which the link refers. In response, the browser application downloads the data and stores the data on the hard disk drive of the user's computer.

Usually, such data is stored in a compressed and encoded form. Often, audiovisual content downloaded over the Internet is encoded in conformity with a Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) standard. Although computers usually have applications that can uncompress and decode such content for presentation to a user, other more traditional content-presenting devices, such as televisions, usually do not have any mechanisms for translating such content into a form that those devices can present to a user.

Sometimes, a user might want to view, on a television, content that the user has downloaded to his computer. If the computer has the proper interface, then the user might be able to connect the computer to the television. The computer might be equipped with an application that can read the content from the computer's hard disk drive, uncompress and decode that content into a form that is presentable by the television, and send the content in such a form to the television through the interface.

However, computers are not easily carried from one location to another. Computers are often relatively large and heavy. Laptop computers are generally smaller and lighter in weight than desktop computers, but still consume a significant quantity of electricity in order to power the hard disk drive on which downloaded content is stored. Although a user might want to view downloaded content on several different televisions at several different locations, the user might be reluctant, due to the size and weight of his computer, to cart his computer around from location to location. Furthermore, computers (especially laptop computers) are quite expensive. Many people do not have the financial means to purchase laptop computers. The average person might be reluctant to purchase a laptop computer unless that person has a need for the laptop computer beyond merely viewing movies and listening to music that the person downloaded over the Internet.

Additionally, because there are so many web sites from which content can be obtained, users might be unaware of the vast majority of content that the users could obtain. If a user is looking for content that relates to a particular topic, the user might try entering, into an Internet search engine, query terms that relate to that topic. Often, though, the results that an Internet search engine returns will exclude references to content of which the search engine is unaware.

Thus, despite the vast amount of content that is stored on various servers throughout the Internet, people do not have an effective and inexpensive way of finding and viewing that content, especially when those people are highly mobile.

