Patent ID: 8392247

Claim:
A method of associating advertisements with services provided in a system, the method comprising: segmenting each advertisement into a number of individually identifiable pieces of data, each piece of data being a separate data file representing a portion of the related advertisement that must be combined with the other segmented data files before the entire advertisements can be played; storing the pieces of data on customer premise equipment used within the system to access the services, wherein at least a portion of the pieces of data for at least one of the advertisements are stored at least two different ones of the customer premises equipment; collecting, at a piece of customer premise equipment being used to access a service and storing at least one of the pieces of data for the at least one of the advertisements, each of the pieces of data for the one of the advertisements from the at least two different ones of the customer premises equipment; arranging, at the piece of customer premise being used to access the service and storing at least one of the pieces of data for the at least one of the advertisements, the collected pieces of data for playback during access to the service; embedding at least the addresses of the at least two different storage locations within each of the pieces of data, the embedded addresses being sufficient for the piece of customer premise equipment being used to access the service to address requests to the at least two different ones of the customer premises equipment to transmit the pieces of data for the one of the advertisements stored thereon to the piece of customer premise equipment being used to access the service storing the advertisements as a function of storage memory available at the customer premise equipment; determining the available storage memory as function of memory allocation agreed to by customers associated with the customer premise equipment, the memory allocation agreed to by the customers being determined from customer inputs received by the customer premise equipment after final installation; purging the one of the advertisements in response to a customer of one of the customer premise equipment storing one of the pieces of data requesting a decrease in memory allocation; relying on the embedded addresses to issue purging instructions to the addresses of each customer premise equipment storing pieces of data of the to be purged advertisement; and the purging of the one of the advertisements preventing further collection of the one of the advertisements by customer premise equipment.