Patent ID: 7827573

Claim:
A method of provisioning a set-top box (STB), the method comprising: receiving STB profile information independent of a conditional access system; storing the STB profile information in a provisioning datastore; receiving a customer order at a service provisioning system independent of the conditional access system; notifying a billing system of the customer order; transmitting a notification of the customer order from the service provisioning system to the conditional access system, the notification communicating customer desired services; storing information from the customer order in the provisioning datastore; notifying a video device manager about the STB; and delivering a configuration message from the video device manager to the STB, the configuration message being based on information from the provisioning datastore, thereby provisioning the STB without essential involvement of the conditional access system, wherein the configuration message is sent in response to a boot-time request from the STB in which the STB discovers a DNS hostname or IP address of the video device manager from an initialization process and the video device manager determines the STB location by reverse-resolving the STB IP address into a DNS hostname via DNS lookups.