Harmonic broadcasting is bandwidth-optimal assuming constant bit rate

Harmonic broadcasting was introduced by Juhn and Tseng in 1997 as a way to reduce the bandwidth requirements required for video-on-demand broadcasting. In this correspondence, we note that harmonic broadcasting is actually a special case of the priority encoded transmission scheme introduced by Albanese et al. in 1996 and prove—using an information theoretic argument—that it is impossible to achieve the design goals of harmonic broadcasting using a shorter encoding.