Patent ID: 7984466

Claim:
A method of managing advertisements in a digital program stream, the method comprising: (a) obtaining a characterization of one or more advertisements based on characterization data supplied by an advertiser, wherein the characterization data comprises minimum bandwidth requirements for the advertisement and facilitates targeting each of the advertisements to a subscriber; (b) recognizing one or more avails in the digital program stream for insertion of one of the advertisements, the digital program stream having a program stream bandwidth; (c) requesting a selection of the one or more advertisements for insertion into at least one of the avails; (d) identifying at least one of the advertisements for insertion into the at least one avail prior to the inserting of the advertisement into the digital program stream based in part on the characterization data from step (a) and a characterization of the at least one avail, the characterization of the at least one avail comprising the program stream bandwidth; (e) returning the selection of the at least one advertisement for insertion into the at least one avail; (f) receiving the at least one advertisement from a storage medium; and (g) compressing the received at least one advertisement to a compressed bandwidth identical to the program stream bandwidth such that the minimum bandwidth requirements are satisfied.