US Patent 11057687 Auxiliary information in manifests

A method of video distribution including receiving a manifest including links to blocks, which blocks form at least a portion of a video program, selecting at least some of the links in the manifest, to which auxiliary information is to be added and adding, to each of the selected links, auxiliary information, which does not affect a block referred to by the link. A log of links requested by clients is retrieved from a storage unit, links relating to a specific video program are filtered from the retrieved log, and information on an extent to which the specific video program was viewed, is determined responsive to the filtered links.