<title>Bandwidth skimming: a technique for cost-effective video on demand</title>

TLDR

The paper proposes a cost‑effective on‑demand video delivery technique that skims a small portion of client bandwidth to reduce server and network load. It reserves a modest skim (≈15%) of client bandwidth and employs near‑optimal hierarchical merging of client streams to achieve these reductions. Experiments demonstrate that this approach cuts server and network bandwidth to logarithmic in the number of viewers, for all media files, while providing immediate service without pre‑loading.

Abstract

This paper proposes a new technique for on-demand delivery of streaming media. The idea is to hold in reserve, or `skim', a portion of the client reception bandwidth that is sufficiently small that display quality is not impacted significantly, and yet that is nonetheless enough to support substantial reductions in server and network bandwidth through near-optimal hierarchical client stream merging. In this paper we show that this objective is feasible, and we develop practical techniques that achieve it. The results indicate that server and network bandwidth can be reduced to on the order of the logarithm of the number of clients who are viewing the object, using a small `skim' (e.g., 15%) of client reception bandwidth. These low server and network bandwidths are achieved for every media file, while providing immediate service to each client, and without having to pre-load initial portions of the video at each client.