Microsoft wants to patent excitement

Microsoft is really desperate to get into our living room lately. Recent technological advance in the "living room sciences" was revealed by a patent application from July 21, 2005 that may credit Microsoft with a method of identifying probability of exciting moments in a television program by analyzing the audio data for that segment. Baseball game is the core example of the patent, although the method is applicable to any sporting game. In baseball game audio is analyzed by baseball hits and by excited speech. For any other event ...

"... exciting portions of a sporting event are automatically identified based on sports-specific events and sports-generic events. The audio data of the sporting event is analyzed to identify sports-specific events (such as baseball hits if the sporting event is a baseball program) as well as sports-generic events (such as excited speech from an announcer). These sports-specific and sports-generic events are used together to identify the exciting portions of the sporting event."

Patent application also mentions that information will be combined into meta data and can be used to provide summary for the given sports game. Recorded program will be coupled with meta data -local or remote which obviously will be used to watch only exciting moments of the content.
I love the idea and it sounds very realistic to implement for certain types of content. If the patent somehow makes it alive into our Tivo/MediaCenter PC, advertisers must start looking for sports-centric commercials with high probability of excitement.
However, as much as I like to have this feature, in my opinion it will not reach us in a free form, not with commercials being mandatory to watch.

Source: ArsTechnica