Abstract While the notion of joint sparsity in understanding common and innovative components of a multi-receiver signal ensemble has been well studied, we investigate the utility of such joint sparse models in representing information contained in a single video signal. By decomposing the content of a video sequence into that observed by multiple spatially and/or temporally distributed receivers, we fifirst recover a collection of common and innovative components pertaining to individual videos. We then present modeling strategies based on subspace-driven manifold metrics to characterize patterns among these components, across other videos in the system, to perform subsequent video analysis. We demonstrate the effificacy of our approach for activity classifification and clustering by reporting competitive results on standard datasets such as, HMDB, UCF-50, Olympic Sports and KTH.