Alcatel Lucent

Rob MacIntosh

Dmitri Vinokurov

A method and apparatus are provided for suppressing display of advertisements within a video over IP stream provided by a content provider. Metadata is prepended to advertisements within the stream. When the stream is received by an access aggregation point, the access aggregation point compares the metadata of an advertisement with preset criteria provided by an enterprise subscriber, and suppresses the advertisement if a comparison of the metadata and the preset criteria indicate that the advertisement is undesirable to the enterprise subscriber. The access aggregation point suppresses the advertisement by switching to a second video channel within the stream for the duration of the advertisement. In this way, the access aggregation point can control display of content provider advertisements without manipulating data within the stream, so as to allow the enterprise subscriber to prevent display of undesirable advertisements to endpoints within the enterprise subscriber site such as set-top boxes within hotel rooms.

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Carp, Canada

Rob MacIntosh