SELECTIVELY RECEIVING MEDIA CONTENT

Disclosed are methods that associate "importance" information with chunks of a media presentation. An end-user device or server uses this information to intelligently manage resources when downloading or rendering the media presentation. Many different types of importance information are used. An editor can tag a chunk as important based on the content of the chunk or may give the chunk a rating, or importance can be inferred from download statistics. In some embodiments, the end-user device determines the importance of a chunk based on observations of the behavior of the device's user. The end-user device can send its locally gathered behavioral observations to a server to enhance that server's demographic information. The server can observe its own download behavior to infer importance. The end-user device may choose to either not download, or to download at a low resolution, those chunks deemed to be unimportant, thus saving bandwidth and battery power.