Patent ID: 7721318

Claim:
An uplink system for a broadband communications system to transmit encoded transport streams to a headend facility including a plurality of decoders for decoding the received encoded transport streams, wherein the decoders each include a storage system for storing data corresponding to the decoded transport streams, the uplink system comprising: a stream unit for forming an encoded transport stream for transmission to the headend facility; and at least one control server to inject into the transport stream formed by the stream unit at least one global control stream common to the plurality of decoders at the headend facility to control operation of each of the plurality of decoders simultaneously to perform desired actions in response to receiving and being targeted by the at least one global control stream, wherein the at least one global control stream comprises a plurality of subscriber group codes, each respective decoder processing each given group code in the plurality of subscriber group codes to determine if a match exists between the given group code relative to decoder group codes stored in memory of the respective decoder and each respective decoder having a current targeted state that is changed to targeted or not targeted if the given group code matches the decoder group codes stored in memory such that each respective decoder has a resulting target state this is either targeted or not targeted after processing each of the plurality of subscriber group codes, each respective decoder performing the desired actions specified in the global control stream if its resulting target state is targeted and not performing the desired actions specified in the global control stream if its resulting target state is not targeted, wherein the desired actions relate to one or more of control of tuning of the each respective targeted decoder, control of the storage systems of each respective targeted decoder, and control of service mapping at each respective targeted decoder.