US Patent 9113202 Inverted client-side fingerprinting and matching

A technique for inverted client side fingerprinting and matching provides the benefits of disposable fingerprinting to identify multiple content streams from multiple clients without overloading a fingerprinting system. Rather than tasking a fingerprinting system with the generation and comparison of all fingerprints, the technique distributes some fingerprinting tasks to the clients receiving the content streams. As a result, the fingerprinting system is not bottlenecked by fingerprinting tasks. In one embodiment, the fingerprinting system can provide additional services to the clients.