A media switch enables a terminal to access content by receiving a content request from a terminal for a first piece of content to be distributed over a cable system, identifying.sup., a personal channel within resources available in the cable system to distribute the first piece of content to the terminal, transmitting access information to the terminal to enable the terminal to access the first piece of content through the personal channel, and interfacing with a cable headend to provide the first piece of content on the personal channel.

Systems and methods for selecting a data delivery network are disclosed. The methods comprise requesting multimedia content delivery, the request comprising an indication of available bandwidth, receiving an indication of an expected performance threshold of a multimedia content item associated with the request for multimedia content, determining a fetch time for the multimedia content item to be delivered from a first data delivery network, and, in response to the fetch time being above the expected performance threshold, selecting a second data delivery network to deliver the multimedia content item.

A media server for an on-board entertainment system comprising terminals, the server comprising: a memory for storing media content; a distribution module configured to distribute stored media content to terminals; a controller for controlling the storage of media content in the storage module; wherein the controller is configured to collect the numbers of accesses via the terminals to the media content, to calculate the value of a retention parameter relating to each item of media content as a function of said number of accesses, and to automatically trigger the continued retention of said media content in the memory or its deletion as a function of at least said calculated value.

A digital content recording network controller device determines a first content of a set of content to be more likely to be requested by a user of a content access device than a second content of the set of content based on monitored behavior of the user. The device stores the first content in a first storage device of a tiered group of storage devices and stores the second content in a second storage device of the tiered group of storage devices wherein the content access device is located closer to the first storage device than the second storage device. This balances storage load with accessibility, resulting in a faster responding system that does not require as much storage.

A method for streaming live video includes encoding a video stream on a server, where the server is connected to a client through a network. The server receives a request from the client for a memory address of a first video frame and checks if the memory address of the first video frame has been bit shifted in a direct mapped memory buffer to determine if the first video frame is available. The server provides a memory address of an output video frame to the client in response to the request.

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 provide access to recorded content from a remote master cloud host.

A technique for managing data objects in a storage cluster includes splitting a media data object into multiple portions at boundaries within the media data object. The technique further includes transforming the portions of the media data object into segments that provide individually processable units and distributing the segments among multiple computing nodes of the storage cluster for storage therein.

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).

A peer-to-peer content distribution network system based on distributed election includes a p2pcdn server cluster and a p2p client network. The p2pcdn server cluster includes any number of server nodes. The p2p client network includes any number of p2p client endpoints that need to use the peer-to-peer content distribution network. Each p2p client endpoint can establish a connection with the p2p server cluster on demand. The peer-to-peer content distribution network can make full use of the uploading capability of each user terminal equipment including mobile phones, tablets and PCs, so that each terminal equipment can communicate with each other, achieve real-time mutual sharing of resources and data, and form a new generation of p2p CDN network that “the more people who download, the faster the speed”.

An edge server (1510) of a Content Delivery Network (2000) comprises an electronic communication unit adapted to be connected to a telematic network and a processing electronic unit adapted to process data packages received and to be transmitted by the electronic communication unit; the processing electronic unit comprises a first storage sub-unit suitable adapted to store contents and a second storage sub-unit adapted to store configuration information related to a home Point Of Presence (1500) of the edge server (1510); the electronic processing unit is programmed to deal with content requests, so that in response to a request for a content if it is, in whole or in part, locally possessed, sends the content and otherwise determines a server address (1520, 1610) by performing a mathematical calculation on a name of the content taking into account configuration information, and causes a request related to the content to be sent to the server address (1520, 1610); at least the choice of server can also be influenced by artificial intelligence algorithms. Examples of embodiments of the present invention achieve high throughput and ultralow latency, i.e. they can be defined as HTULL.