A fixed-delay broadcasting protocol for video-on-demand

Broadcasting protocols reduce the cost of video-ondemand services by distributing more efficiently videos that are likely to be simultaneously watched by many viewers. Rather than answering individual customer requests, they broadcast the contents of each video according to a fixed schedule. We present a fixed-delay pagoda broadcasting protocol that requires all users to wait for a small fixed delay before watching the video they have selected. The protocol uses this delay to reduce the bandwidth required to transmit the first minutes of each video. As a result, our protocol provides the lowest waiting times of all protocols using segments of equal duration and channels of equal bandwidth. In addition, its performance is not very far from the theoretical minimum. We also show how to modify our protocol to restrict the set-top box receiving bandwidth to two times the video consumption rate.