Abstract

Broadcasting protocols can improve the efficiency of video on demand services by reducing the bandwidth required to transmit videos that are simultaneously watched by many viewers. It has been recently shown that broadcasting protocols using a very large number of very low bandwidth streams for each video required less total bandwidth than protocols using a few high-bandwidth streams shared by all videos. We present a hybrid broadcasting protocol that combines the advantages of these two classes of protocols. Our pagoda broadcasting protocol uses only a small number of high-bandwidth streams and requires only slightly more bandwidth than the best extant protocols to achieve a given maximum waiting time. Keywords: video on demand, video broadcasting, harmonic broadcasting 1. INTRODUCTION Broadcasting protocols for video on demand (VOD) aim at efficiently delivering "hot" videos---that is, videos that are likely to be watched by many viewers. Rather than transmitting one separate data...

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