The present disclosure provides a system and methods for determining and reserving an optimized amount of required cloud instance resources in order to provide quality streaming to viewers while also reducing overhead costs. For content providers, the choice of appropriate cloud location to transcode the live streams and appropriate number of video representations to serve the current viewership is a key in minimizing cost. However, this task cannot typically be done on the fly due to the properties of live streaming characterized by its dynamic, heterogeneity and wideness. The provided system helps predict the incoming load and the exact number of resources to allocate at each cloud site to help prevent the content provider from over-provisioning resources, leading to an extra cost, or under-provisioning resources, leading to viewers' dissatisfaction.

Technology for content distribution in wireless mesh network is described. In one embodiment, a cloud computing system includes one or more computing devices running a media provider service and a content management service. The media provider service is configured to select a subset of a plurality of media titles having a highest relative popularity available from one or more media content providers for distribution to one or more mesh nodes in a wireless mesh network. The content management service is configured to retrieve media content files corresponding to the subset of the plurality of media titles, divide each of the media content files into a plurality of smaller segments, send at least a portion of the plurality of smaller segments to the one or more mesh nodes in the wireless mesh network.

A content stream matching and processing process is provided. A computing device receives a plurality of content streams. The computing device processes the content streams to generate picture data information. The picture data information can be utilized to determine whether the content streams can be aligned. Based on the alignment, the computing device can characterize the similarity of the content streams.

Various arrangements of a local cloud system for providing television services are presented. A facility cloud host system may have a content service provider interface that is used to receive live television channel streams from a television content service provider. The local cloud system may have a transcoder that transcodes the live television channels into a format to be transmitted locally to client devices. The local cloud system may have a property management system interface through which temporary user information is imported for accounts linked to the client devices. The local cloud system may provide digital video recorder (DVR) services for the accounts mapped to the client devices.

A system and method for optimizing defragmentation of content in a content delivery network (CDN). In an example, a manifest available to the content delivery node with respect to a particular content as well as segment files stored in a database cache of the content delivery node are analyzed to determine if any segment files referenced by the manifest are absent from the database cache. If so, one or more delivery rules associated with the content delivery node based on historical ABR asset delivery patterns may be applied to determine representations of the absent segment files that satisfy the one or more delivery rules. After determining compliant representations of the absent segment files, they may be pulled from another content delivery node of the CDN (e.g., a parent node or an edge server node).

Methods and apparatus for supporting content delivery service are described. In accordance with the invention content can be supplied to temporary storage of a regional or local server used to supply the content to a customer's premises when the requested content is not already available in the regional or local server. A content server hierarchy may be implemented with servers higher up in the hierarchy including more content, e.g., titles, than the number of titles stored in the lower level servers. By storing less frequently accessed content in servers higher in the hierarchy and frequently requested titles lower in the hierarchy, a vast number of titles can be supported without overburdening the storage available at local and regional servers. In addition, a national or other server high in the hierarchy can be used to store, move, and distribute local or other content as part of an on demand service.

A computing device includes an interface configured to interface and communicate with a dispersed storage network (DSN), a memory that stores operational instructions, and a processing module operably coupled to the interface and memory such that the processing module, when operable within the computing device based on the operational instructions, is configured to perform various operations. The computing device determines to facilitate migration of encoded data slices (EDSs) from a first storage unit (SU) pool to a second SU pool and identifies storage resources associated with the EDSs to be migrated. The computing device then generates a migration schedule for the EDSs based on performance information associated with storage resources and facilitates the migration of the plurality of EDSs based on the migration schedule using the storage resources based on an aggression factor and adapts the aggression factor as deemed necessary based on the performance information.

Systems, devices, and methods for streaming media content over a network are provided. One exemplary method of streaming media content over a network involves transmitting one or more portions of the media content to a client device via a delivery route between a content delivery source and the network, determining a performance metric associated with the transmitting of the one or more portions via the delivery route, and dynamically adjusting the delivery route between the content delivery source and the network based at least in part on the performance metric.

Apparatus and methods for utilizing a blockchain-based mechanism to verify one or more events within a content distribution network, such as a cable, satellite, of HFC network. In some embodiments, the events relate to a display of alternate or secondary content (e.g., advertising content) distributed across a plurality of content networks carried by the content distribution network. A plurality of data (including records and verification data) are collected based on the occurrence (or failure) of the event, and subsequently processed to produce hash values. The hash values can be implemented to form blocks and chains (i.e., a blockchain), thereby validating the events within each block. The hash values also serve as sufficient proof of the event and hence, the content distributor is relieved of having to report voluminous data to third party entities they are contracted therewith. The hash values also serve to protect the privacy of customers by masking sensitive or propriety information relating thereto.

Multiple segmentation servers are synchronized to provide failover capacity in such a way that should a failover occur, the segment numbers/playlists/encryption keys/decryption keys are identical on each of the segmentation servers. Synchronizing the contents of a segmentation server on one or more backup segmentation servers ensures that the delivery of a content stream is immune to the failure of segmentation servers, provided at least one segmentation server remains fault-free. A caching server may further facilitate the fault tolerance by checking the availability of the individual segmentation servers, collect content segments from one of the segmentation servers, and serve the content segment to clients. The caching server automatically checks a primary segmentation server to ensure it is available (e.g., online), and provides automatic failover to a backup segmentation server should the primary server experience a fault (e.g., go offline).