Prime Research Alliance E., Inc.

John P Blasko

Charles Anthony Eldering

Gregory C Flickinger

John A Schlack

M Lamine Sylla

In accordance with the invention, advertisement identifiers are stored in a queue in memory in the set top box or elsewhere corresponding to individual subscribers of a television service delivery network. The advertisements are retrieved and displayed in the order dictated by the queue as advertisement avails are detected in the particular channel information stream being watched by that subscriber. Accordingly, the subscriber sees the advertisements regardless of what channel or television program is being watched and sees them in the order dictated by the queue. The invention also is applicable to other information streams including Internet advertising, audio/radio advertising and advertising in electronic program guides.

Queue based advertisement scheduling and sales

In one embodiment, a method for managing advertisement opportunities in a network environment includes retrieving advertisement parameters supplied by an advertiser; creating at least one program substream by dividing a program stream; identifying avails that are positioned within the program stream and dividing the avails into one or more subavails in the at least one program substream; retrieving subscriber characteristics related to viewers of the at least one program substream; and correlating the subscriber characteristics with the advertisement parameters to determine which advertisement is the optimum advertisement to schedule to display in the one or more subavails.

System and method for managing advertising in program streams

Method and system for managing advertising in program streams. Advertisement opportunities (avails) in a program stream may be divided into sections (subavails) with the goal of directing advertising at a particular target audience (group). A program stream is split into one or more sub-streams to produce additional advertising avail sections (subavails) able to be targeted to a subgroup of subscribers. Subavails may also refer to various advertisement opportunities in different presentation streams (sub-streams). Each sub-stream may be targeted at a subgroup of subscribers with demographic and product preference characteristics. By correlating the subscriber characteristics with advertisement parameters supplied by an advertiser, the system/method determines which advertisement is best to display in the one or more subavails. Accordingly, such a subavail, or group of subavails may be sold to an advertiser, e.g., via an auction.

Method and system for creating one or more advertising avail sections (subavails) and thereupon aggregating the subavails to form one or more groups of subavails. The advertisement opportunities (avails) may be divided into sections (subavails) with each section being directed at a particular target audience (group). The subavails are then aggregated into one or more groups of subavails so that the groups of subavails can be sold to the advertisers. The grouping of subavails is generally based on a correlation wherein the subavails are characterized based on one or more characteristics. The groups of subavails are formed based on one or more shared characteristics. The advertiser has an option to buy a group of subavails (rather than an avail in prior art), whereby the advertiser may reach a targeted group of an audience.

Grouping advertisement subavails

A system, computer code, and method are provided for automatically managing avail inventory data of media programming streams for a communications network, such as a cable TV network. The computer-implemented method includes the steps of correlating available addressable units of the communications network with the avail inventory data, and generating a proposed price for purchase of at least one avail based on the results of the correlating step.

System and method for automatically managing avail inventory data and avail pricing

A subscriber characterization system with filters in which the subscriber's selections are monitored, including monitoring of the time duration programming is watched, the volume at which the programming is listened to, and any available information regarding the type of programming, including category and sub-category of the programming. The raw subscriber selection data is then processed to eliminate data associated with irrelevant activities such as channel surfing, channel jumping, or extended periods of inactivity. The actual subscriber selection data is used to form program characteristics vectors. The programming characteristics vectors can be used in combination with the actual subscriber selection data to form a subscriber profile. Heuristic rules indicating the relationships between programming choices and demographics can be applied to generate additional probabilistic subscriber profiles regarding demographics and programming and product interests.

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New Hope, PA, United States of America

John P Blasko