Low-cost, scalable TV/video on-demand distribution over Telco networks

With the proliferation of IP networking and wireless access, local exchange carriers (LEC) are under tremendous pressure to evolve into broadband service providers. On-demand video distribution to the mass appears to be one of the best evolution paths for the LEC. Various approaches for providing on-demand content/video distribution to massive viewers are compared. In particular, a novel low-cost network architecture called DINA for distributing video content to massive viewers is described. DINA employs hybrid multicast-unicast streaming to achieve scalability. Furthermore, it offers full interactive functions to the viewers and readily deployable over existing broadband network infrastructures. An innovative technique to offer low-cost on-demand video services to massive subscribers called multi-stream multicasting is described. It employs fixed but irregular stream intervals that can significantly reduce the startup latency. Many fault protection mechanisms are built into the DINA architecture to improve the robustness. DINA also offers additional protection against copyright infringement and has been demonstrated commercially.