US Patent 8386588 Serial subscriptions

Methods and apparatus provide for a serial subscriber to provide an RSS feed that is updated according to the user's consumption of serialized content. The serial subscriber creates a subscription request to receive a feed of serialized content from a content source, the feed comprising a plurality of episode references to episodes of the serialized content. The serial subscriber defines a subscription point relative to at least one episode reference within the feed of serialized content to designate where to parse the serialized content for downloading at least one episode of the serialized content. The serial subscriber creates a graphical representation of the at least one downloaded episode and monitors playback of the at least one downloaded episode to update the feed of serialized content with respect to the subscription point.