Method and System for a Natural Transition Between Advertisements Associated with Rich Media Content

1 . A method comprising:

receiving a plurality of candidate segmentation points associated with a portion of rich media content;

selecting a subset of said candidate segmentation points that meet one or more segmentation constraints, said selected subset of segmentation points defining a plurality of temporal segments of the rich media content; and

providing said selected subset of segmentation points for association of a different one of a plurality of advertisements with each of the temporal segments.

2 . The method of claim 1 , wherein said candidate segmentation points are temporal points in the rich media content associated with events selected from the group consisting of scene changes, topic changes, speaker changes, the start of an audio break and the end of an audio break.

3 . The method of claim 1 , wherein said constraints include one or more of a minimum segment length, a maximum segment length and a preferred segment length.

4 . The method of claim 1 , wherein said constraints include one or more of minimizing the number of segments and minimizing the variance among segment lengths.

5 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

receiving a plurality of initial segmentation points associated with the portion of rich media content;

and wherein said selecting a subset of said candidate segmentation points includes selecting for each initial segmentation point a candidate segmentation point that is temporally closest to the initial segmentation point, consistent with said segmentation constraints.

6 . A method comprising:

based on the subject matter of each of a plurality of portions of rich media content, correlating to each of said portions a different one of a plurality of advertisements;

selecting from each portion of rich media content a segmentation point based on a visual component of said portion, temporally adjacent segmentation points defining a segment of said content; and

providing said segmentation points for association of each of said correlated advertisements with the corresponding segment of content.

7 . The method of claim 6 , wherein said selecting includes selecting a segmentation point that corresponds to one of a scene change, a wipe, and a speaker change in said video component of said content.