US Patent 10931991 Methods and systems for selectively skipping through media content

The disclosure provides methods and systems for skipping unwanted portions of media content based on a crowdsourcing feedback model. The media content may include television programming content, video content, and audio content. The unwanted portions of media content include, for example, television commercials, opening and closing credits. An exemplary crowdsourcing feedback model involves receiving and processing a plurality of user seek information records. These records include time markers of the media content indicating when the users started and stopped fast forwarding or when the users started and stopped moving a scrub bar to jump from one portion of the content to another. When collected, the user seek information records are used to train a machine-learning system to calculate start and stop times of unwanted portions of media content. Once the start and stop times are calculated, user devices are enabled to automatically skip these unwanted portions.