Methods and apparatus are provided for detecting potential repeating content, such as commercials, in a video data stream by receiving one or more video data streams, parsing each video data stream into a plurality of segments, creating audio fingerprints of each segment, storing the plurality of audio fingerprints in a database, and identifying any audio fingerprints in the received and parsed one or more video data streams that match audio fingerprints in the database that were previously stored from video data streams that were previously received and parsed. Video fingerprints are then created for these same pairs of segments and a similarity analysis is performed. The results of the video fingerprint analysis is used to make a determination of subsequent actions to be taken by a content processing platform that performs recognition processing of the content associated with the segments identified as being potentially repeating content.