Patent ID: 7039932

Claim:
A method of transmitting television programming and advertising from a head end to subscribers at a plurality of subscriber nodes, said method comprising the steps of: (a) creating a plurality of subscriber groups, members of said subscriber groups being based on at least one characteristic of said subscribers relevant to advertising; (b) receiving at least one programming channel of television programming; (c) forming from said at least one programming channel a plurality of presentation channels of television programming, the plurality of presentation channels having programming identical to said at least one programming channel, each presentation channel corresponding to one of the subscriber groups; (d) storing a plurality of advertisements for insertion into advertising avails in said presentation channels; (e) storing for each presentation channel a queue comprising an ordered list of advertisement resource locators (ARLs), said ARLs comprising a pointer to a location of a corresponding advertisement; (f) determining advertising avails in each of said presentation channels; (g) for each presentation channel, determining from said queue corresponding to said presentation channel an advertisement to be inserted in the advertising avails in said presentation channel; (h) inserting said advertisement determined in step (g) into said corresponding avail; (i) transmitting each of said presentation channels to at least those subscriber nodes in said subscriber group corresponding to said presentation channel; and (i) assigning each subscriber to one or more of the subscriber groups, wherein the assigning includes creating an advertising group map disclosing an advertising group to which each subscriber belongs and transmitting said advertising group map to said subscriber nodes.