Deploying Video-on-Demand Services on Cable Networks
Matthew Allen
Ben Y. Zhao
Rich Wolski
The 27th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2007)
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Paper Abstract
Efficient video-on-demand (VoD) is a highly desired service for media and
telecom providers. VoD allows subscribers to view any item in a large
media catalog nearly-instantaneously. However, systems that provide this
services currently require large amounts of centralized resources and
significant bandwidth to accommodate their subscribers. Hardware
requirements become more substantial as the service providers increase
the catalog size or number of subscribers. In this paper, we describe how
cable companies can leverage deployed hardware in a peer-to-peer
architecture to provide an efficient alternative. We propose a
distributed VoD system, and use real measurements from a deployed VoD
system to evaluate different design decisions. Our results show that with
minor changes, currently deployed cable infrastructures can support a
video-on-demand system that scales to a large number of users and catalog
size with low centralized resources.