Advertising management system for digital video streams

• US 6,820,277 B1
• Filed: 04/20/2000
• Issued: 11/16/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 04/20/1999
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Prime Research Alliance E, LLC
• Original Assignee: Expanse Networks, Inc.
• Inventors: Hamilton, Jeffrey S., Eldering, Charles A., Flickinger, Gregory C.
• Primary Examiner(s): Srivastava, Vivek
• Assistant Examiner(s): DEMICCO, MATTHEW R
• Application Number:
  US09/553,637
• Time in Patent Office: 1,671 Days
• Field of Search: 725/14, 725/32, 725/34-36, 725/42, 725/46, 725/52, 705/26
• US Class Current: 725/35
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/23424 involving splicing one content stream with another content stream, e.g. for inserting or substituting an advertisement
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/235 Processing of additional data, e.g. scrambling of additional data or processing content descriptors
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/252 Processing of multiple end-users' preferences to derive collaborative data
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/25883 being end-user demographical data, e.g. age, family status or address arrangements for identifying locations of users in broadcast systems H04H60/52
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/25891 being end-user preferences retrieval of video data in a video database based on user preferences G06F16/739; arrangements for recognizing users' preferences H04H60/46; user profiles in network data switching protocols H04L67/306; processing of user preferences or user profiles in wireless networks H04W8/18
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/435 Processing of additional data, e.g. decrypting of additional data, reconstructing software from modules extracted from the transport stream
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/47 End-user applications
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/478 Supplemental services, e.g. displaying phone caller identification, shopping application
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/812 involving advertisement data advertising per se G06Q30/02
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/8586 by using a URL processing chained hypermedia data for information retrieval G06F16/94; information retrieval from the Internet by using URLs G06F16/955; URL in broadcast information H04H20/93; Web-based protocols H04L67/02
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 7/165 Centralised control of user terminal subsequent to an upstream request signal H04N7/17345; Registering at central by two-way working H04N7/17309

Abstract

An Ad Management System (AMS) for managing sales and insertion of targeted advertisements into advertising opportunities (“avails”). The AMS provides advertisers an ability to describe their advertisements (ad characteristics) in terms of target market demographics, required ad bandwidth, ad duration, and other ad specific parameters. The AMS receives the ad characteristics and matches the ads to the avails. The AMS tracks different avails including duration and bandwidth of the avail, and uses a number of schemes to determine if the ad can be placed in the avail. The AMS targets advertisements by correlating subscriber characteristics to the ad characteristics. The subscriber characteristics may be associated with groups of subscribers (e.g. nodes in cable television environments) or to individual subscribers.

Claims

1. A system for inserting advertisements into video streams, wherein the advertisements are selected for insertion so as to target a specific audience, the system comprising:

a first module for determining where avails are within the video streams, wherein the first module also gathers information about the targeted audience of the video stream as avail characterization information;

a second module for gathering data related to advertisements including ad characterization information;

a third module for gathering data related to subscribers, including subscriber characterization information;

a fourth module for correlating the ad characterization information and the subscriber characterization information as a demographic correlation, wherein the fourth module also correlates the ad characterization information and the avail characterization information as a avail correlation and generates an average correlation based on the demographic correlation and the avail correlation; and

a fifth module for inserting one of the advertisements into one of the avails based on the results of the fourth module.