The Case for Aggressive Partial Preloading in Broadcasting Protocols for Video-on-Demand

Broadcasting protocols for video-on-demand usually consume over fifty percent of their bandwidth to distribute the first ten to fifteen minutes of the videos they distribute. Since all these protocols require the user set-top box to include a disk drive, the authors propose to use this drive to store the first five to twenty minutes of the ten to twenty most popular videos. This will provide low-cost instant access to these videos. An important factor in the high cost of video-on-demand services is the very high bandwidth these services require. Assuming that the videos are in MPEG-2 format, each user request will require the delivery of around 5 Megabits of data per second.