Content acquisition method

The present invention can remarkably improve the efficiency of the acquisition process. It is determined if requested contents data are stored in a hard disk or not and, if they are not stored yet, they are acquired from a contents providing server 6 and subsequently a corresponding contents attributes file 47 is acquired from an attributes information providing server 7. If the requested contents data are already stored in the hard disk, the contents data are not requested and only the corresponding contents attributes file 47 is acquired from the attributes information providing server 7. In this way, it is possible to avoid acquiring contents data in duplicate and remarkably reduce the time necessary for the acquisition process to remarkably improve the-efficiency of the acquisition process.