System and method for identifying and selecting portions of information streams for a television system

A Profile Subsystem (which contains a profile of profile items in a database of information of interest to a viewer of a TV) will control selection of one or more of the segments of information if the segments themselves contain one or more profile items. In addition, an Information Processor will process the received information streams and segments to identify streams of interest to the viewers. In this case, the audio segments are processed by any one or more of the following methods: using speech recognition to generate a searchable transcript for key word searching, audio processing to determine the type of audio including any one or more of the following: speech, music, noise, sounds, and speaker identification processing to determine the identity of a particular speaker. The video segments are processed by any one or more of the following methods: using image processing to identify a searchable person, place, thing, action, or event. The data segments are processed by any one or more of the following methods: using text processing to generate a searchable hit list of one or more words. The Information Processor will generate identifiers from the processed segments and the identifiers will then be used by the Profile Subsystem to control the selection of information streams.