Abstract: An interactive television system tailoring delivery of interactive content. The system includes a request processing engine accepting user interactions with an interactive television (ITV) application. A user profiling engine associates the user interactions with an individual profile or profile group. The profile group defines events that may be triggered upon receipt of certain user interactions. A trigger/event engine monitors, in real-time, whether the user interactions correspond to any of the defined events. If an event is to be triggered, an action engine transmits an ITV command associated with the event to an encoder. The encoder performs a real-time of encoding of the ITV command for providing viewers with a dynamic ITV experience. The ITV experience provided to the viewers may also be customized based on the profile information obtained for each individual viewer.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for delivering interactive television (ITV) data by using the same TV scan line that also carries closed caption data. The ITV data is inserted into the scan line with CC data by detecting a gap associated with a first CC data unit. If the gap is large enough to contain all of the group of ITV data units then electronically insert the entire group of ITV data units into the gap. If the gap is not large enough to contain the entire group of ITV data units, insert a subset of the entire group of the ITV data units into the gap and continue to the gaps associated with successive CC data units, inserting subsets of the ITV data into subsequent gaps until the entire ITV message has been inserted into the gaps between CC data units.

Abstract: A system and method for efficiently and quickly handling content and transaction requests from various users at respective end terminals. According to embodiments of the invention, plural servers are provided at the web site to randomly receive requests from users over a communications network, such as the Internet. Each server contains a memory, such as a cache or disk storage process, that contains a copy of all data contained on every other server. When a request comes in to one of the servers, in addition to processing the request, that server broadcasts data corresponding to the request to the other servers, which are programmed to store the same request data in their respective local memories. Such broadcasts may be preferably carried out over a back-end, private network.