A Broadcasting Protocol for Interactive Video-on-Demand Services

This work presents a broadcasting protocol for interactive video-on-demand service. The proposed broadcasting allows the user to play the video-cassette-recorder (VCR) functions which includes the limited fast-forwarding capability. Consider a film S is divided into n equal parts {S1, S2, ..., Sn} and played through k channels. The user simultaneously downloads the film segments from k channels into the set-top-box (STB) and plays them in order. Every time the user wants to play VCR functions, the needed segments either saved in the user’s STB or are being continuously downloaded from k channels. The main character is that the server doesn’t need to allocate an extra stream to send the missing segments to the user. As a result, the proposed method outperforms the previous broadcasting methods without an extra stream in terms of the maximum waiting time, for the same number of channels. Key-Words: Broadcasting, Interactive, Video-Cassette-Recorder, Video-on-Demand, Waiting Time.