Limiting the Client Bandwidth of Broadcasting Protocols for Videos on Demand

Broadcasting protocols can lower the cost of video-ondemand services by more efficiently distributing all videos that are simultaneously watched by many viewers. The most efficient broadcasting protocols require a customer settop box capable of capturing data from five to seven video channels at the same time. We show how to modify existing broadcasting protocols so that their client bandwidth would never exceed three to four channels and apply our method to the fast broadcasting and the new pagoda broadcasting protocols. Our data show that this modification has only a moderate effect on the overall performance of the two protocols because their server bandwidth never increases by more than 15 percent.