Patent Application
20080319840
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of TV over IP services and more particularly to distribution of live TV programming in a TV-Over IP environment and employing the data available to create and present real-time auctioning of advertising blocks based on immediate viewer data detection.
2. Related Art
Providing live TV broadcast through broadband IP networks has become a viable approach for high quality TV services. Due to the interactive nature of the IP network, user channel viewing statistics can be collected in real-time fashion.
Such a system typically consist of head-ends that sends encoded digital TV signals into the IP network as multicast streams, Set-Top-Boxes (STB) on the users'premises connecting to TV sets. At any given time, the STBs can select one of the multicast streams and decode the digital signals and send TV signals to an attached TV set.
It is therefore desirable to collect the current statistics of channel viewing available through the STB, formulate the data by demographic or other indicia and present the data substantially real-time to advertising contacts, provide support functions for auctions of advertising time blocks on a substantially real time basis for bid by the advertisers based on the statistics, and insert advertising media into the transmission stream based on the winning bid.
The present invention provides a system for real time auctioning of advertising timeslots for live TV transmission over IP networks. The system incorporates settop boxes interconnected to a server to provide real time viewing statistics to an advertising management system which also recieves subscriber information from a subscriber management system. The advertising management system determines demographics responsive to the subscriber information and viewing statistics and publishes advertising timeslot information and the determined demographics. A management terminal is employed for creating user accounts and providing access information to users. The management terminal also is employed for inspecting and approving advertisements responsive to input of said advertisements from said users. Bid parameters are defined using the management terminal and the publication by the system to the users is responsive to the bid parameters. User terminals are provided for uploading advertisements to the advertising management system and the advertising management system further assigns unique identification to the uploaded advertisements. The user terminals upload advertising parameters, receive the published time slots and demographics and submit bids to the advertising management system. The advertising management system recieves the bids and inserts predefined advertisements responsive to a winning bid.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be better understood by reference to the following detailed description when considered in connection with the accompanying drawings wherein:
A collection server can be a stand-alone server or a software module running on a machine that also runs other applications. The collection server receives channel viewing data from STBs on the network. For large deployment, a system incorporating the present invention employs a number of collection servers forming a hierarchy. The data is then funneled to a central server 18.
A security system 20 is employed to ensure the authenticity of the STB messages received by the collection server. An exemplary security approach is comparable to that defined in copending patent application Ssr. No. ______ carrying attorney docket no. U001 100248 and entitled Methods and Apparatus for Message Security in an IPTV Environment having a common assignee with the present application, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. Security system 20 authenticates an STB and issues tokens for the STB to access other components of the IPTV environment whereby the messages from this STB to the collection server are authenticated by the system.
The central server records statistical data for all channels presented to viewers over the network. The viewing statistics are analyzed in conjunction with a subscriber management system 22. As shown in
The advertisement management system is incorporated in the network. Through interactive operation on the management terminal an operator creates an account for a potential advertiser 302, sets the account parameters 304, such as username and password, payment related information, etc. as shown in
The user interfaces and the management terminal include a video subsystem and are employed for inspecting and approving the ads 312 for use in the network by the operator. The management terminal interface also allows the operator to add and remove ad time slots 314, set the bidding time windows 316, det starting price 318, buy-out price 320, and other applicable parameters.
As shown in
Having now described the invention in detail as required by the patent stautes, those skilled in the art will recognize modifications and substitutions to the specific embodiments disclosed herein. Such modifications are within the scope and intent of the present invention as defined in the following claims.
