Television advertisement delivery system and method

An advertisement delivery system employs an advertisement delivery service that discourages viewers from channel surfing. To this end, advertisers agree to pay at least a portion, if not all, of the consumer's premium video services charges, if in turn, the consumer agrees to watch the advertisements targeted to him/her as a function of an agreed upon interest profile. Viewers and advertisers subscribe to the advertisement delivery service, and deliver specific advertisements to a subscriber as a function of, for example, the particular household it is being delivered to, type of program, time of day, day of the week, a subscriber's interest profile or the like. To this end, television programming and advertisements are supplied to subscribers from a central video server that is informed when a subscriber has made a change in the channel being viewed. Additionally, the video server can insert point-to-point advertisements, i.e., insert different advertisements directed toward different viewers or groups of views, even if the program to be viewed is a broadcast program. Channel surfing is discouraged in one embodiment of the invention by supplying the same advertisement in the same commercial interval to all the subscribed channels for a particular subscriber. In another embodiment of the invention, when channel surfing is initiated while an advertisement is playing, the advertisement playout is "paused" until the subscriber returns to the original channel that was being viewed. Once the subscriber returns to the original channel, the playing out of the advertisement is automatically resumed. In still another embodiment of the invention, the subscriber is controllably inhibited from selecting a channel other than the one presently being viewed during the commercial intervals.