Cablevision announced that it has recently surpassed one billion Caller ID on TV messages on its customers’ TV screens.

The free Caller ID on TV feature, which was launched in November across the company’s entire New York City metropolitan footprint (story here), is available to digital cable customers who also subscribe to Cablevision’s Optimum Voice service.

Caller ID on iO TV features the same Caller ID information customers would find on a telephone, but instead, Cablevision uses its fiber optic network and digital set-top boxes (STBs) to transfer the incoming caller information to television screens. The information is presented whenever a customer is watching live TV or viewing recorded programming on a digital video recorder (DVR).

When an incoming call is received, customers see the Caller ID display scroll onto the upper left corner of their TV screen. The display is present for approximately seven seconds.

"Caller ID on iO TV was an enhancement and a product integration that just made perfect sense, and the feedback we've gotten from customers in response to this free service has been overwhelmingly positive," said John Trierweiler, Cablevision's SVP of product management.

"You almost forget it's there, until the phone rings when you're watching television and immediately know who is calling,” Trierweiler continued. “It's amazing to think we have delivered more than a billion such messages to our customers already – about nine million every day – so early in the life of this new service."

More than one-third of the homes in Cablevision's market now subscribe to Optimum Voice.

Converged services such as Caller ID on TV are seen as strong customer retention tools by operators. Integra5 has launched TV Caller ID and, more recently, PC Caller ID with various operators across the nation.

Time Warner Cable’s (TWC) Caller ID on TV was first launched in June 2005 in its Columbia, S.C., system, with the second launch in Rochester, N.Y., in September of the same year. Currently, TWC has Caller ID on TV in more than half of its 23 divisions.

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