Patent ID: 7860743

Claim:
A method of managing advertisements in a media system used to provide services to a number of subscriber media devices, the subscriber media devices being stationed at subscriber locations to facilitate access to the services, the method comprising: requesting a subscriber associated with each media device to identify an amount of memory to be made available on the associated media device for storing advertisements; distributing portions of a number of advertisements for storage on the media devices according to the identified amount of available memory, wherein each portion contains a fraction of an entire advertisement and must be combined with the other portions in order to show the entire advertisement; distributing the portions such that at least two portions of the entire advertisement is stored on at least two different media devices; and purging one or more of the portions of the entire advertisement from the media devices in response to the subscriber requesting a reduction in the amount of memory to be made available for storing advertisements including issuing purging instructions to each of the media devices storing portions of the entire advertisements.