As used herein, a “characteristic” of a player refers to any marking, tag, or other signal used to identify a player, including the position of the player, to people or media systems. For example, characteristics of a player may be physical markings that appear on an actual player as the player participates in a televised sporting event (e.g., a jersey number, team name, a name appearing on the uniform, etc.). In some embodiments, the characteristics may also include tags transmitted with the sports programming (e.g., from media content source 716 (FIG. 7)) as metadata, which indicates to the media application particular traits and/or attributes (including, but not limited to, the name of a player and/or the position of the player on currently displayed sports programming). In some embodiments, the characteristics of players currently appearing in sports programming may be transmitted in the form of media data. For example, the characteristics determined by an object recognition module incorporated into a media application may be transmitted to a remote server for processing. Additionally or alternatively, media data describing the characteristics may be transmitted from a remote server to a media application.