Effective sharing of digital multimedia content viewing history

We propose a new multimedia viewing environment in which users can effectively share their histories of viewing digital content. A viewing history is a record of which parts of the content the user viewed and/or listened to (and how many times) and which parts the user skipped. Since the parts viewed more frequently should reflect their importance, an effectively utilized viewing history can facilitate browsing of the content by new viewers. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, we constructed a digital media viewing environment in which an automatically updated summary of the viewing histories of other users could be downloaded from and one's own viewing history could be uploaded to a database on a server through the Internet. Testing in this environment demonstrated that the summary of the viewing histories of other users enhances a new viewer's browsing of content.