Modeling of an Online TV Recording Service

Recently, new services have emerged which utilize the Internet as a delivery mechanism for multimedia content. With the advent of broadband accesses, more users are willing to download large volume content from servers, such as video files of TV shows. While some popular video services or some broadcasting companies use streaming data with Flash technology, some media distributors (e.g. iTunes) offer entire TV shows for download. These files are offered in different file formats and can consist of several hundred megabytes up to 1GB or more depending on the length of the TV show as well as the encoding format.