Abstract: A system, method, and computer readable medium for customer loyalty based Internet Protocol television advertising, comprises, recording a viewership of a viewed advertisement, collecting a view time of the viewed advertisement, and crediting a viewer with having viewed the advertisement.

Abstract: A bridge/router and method are described herein that are capable of avoiding packet replication at layer 2 where there is a failure in a network. In one embodiment, the bridge/router is informed about a fault which occurred within the network. Then, the bridge/router makes a determination about whether or not multiple LSPs would be used to flood/carry the same IP traffic out off a single port. If yes, the first bridge/router chooses one of the LSPs to carry the IP traffic out the single port and then prevents the IP traffic from being carried on the remaining LSP(s) out the single port which avoids the packet replication on a link which is associated with the single port. If no, then the first bridge/router allows the IP traffic to be carried on the LSPs out off more than one port.

Abstract: The PIP system enables display of a mosaic of favorite channels in a Picture-in-Picture (PIP) format to a subscriber terminal. Picture-in-Picture support is efficiently provided by sending only I-Frames of the secondary video channel to the end-user. That is, any unnecessary packets (null, B-P frames, audio, etc.) in the secondary video channel are stripped away. This method uses very little bandwidth and is STB agnostic.

Abstract: A system, method, and computer readable medium for a customer premises equipment based advertisement insertion mechanism for Internet Protocol based networks, comprises, storing advertisements in a customer premises equipment, detecting an advertisement insertion signal in a data stream, and multiplexing the stored advertisements into the data stream upon the detecting of the advertisement insertion signal.

Abstract: A circular buffer in a video delivery server tracks a second copy of a live video stream to provide instant replay capability. When an end-user initiates the instant replay function, the circular buffer is copied to an instant-replay buffer, from which a replay of the video is sent to the end-user. During replay the end-user can use playback functions such as pause, slow-play, freeze frame, etc. Upon leaving the replay function the end user rejoins the live stream. The circular buffer also enables transmission of delayed copies of the live stream, time-shifted by predetermined intervals, which copies are multicasted to end-users. Upon request, an end-user may join a delayed version of interest. This allows the user to replay interesting content by jumping to a time-delayed version without missing the show and to catch up with real-time during e.g. commercial breaks.

Abstract: In a system that provides decoding of A/V streams, this invention reduces switching delays between different streams by modifying the Program Identification (PID) values of the Audio and Video data to common PID values that are already known by the decoder. This technique allows the decoder to stay in a run state when switching between A/V streams, thereby reducing channel change times.

Abstract: A server at the edge of a broadband network distributes multimedia content streams to clients, while ensuring that the first data delivered to each client is key data (milestones) needed for correctly decoding the stream content. This is obtained by buffering the packets in the incoming stream and transmitting the packets from the buffer in an outgoing stream, starting with the most recent milestone placed in the buffer before a request to join the respective incoming stream is received. As the writing to and reading from the buffer are performed at different rates, the incoming and outgoing streams are eventually synchronized, at which point the client may be switched to receive the incoming stream directly.