Large-scale personalized video streaming with program insertion proxies

Increasingly intelligent Internet overlay networks promise to deliver streaming media and value-added media services in ways that cannot be achieved easily with conventional broadcast networks. Such an overlay would allow an individual viewer or groups of viewers to receive unique programming content (e.g., commercial advertisements, entertainment) that matches their previously specified preferences. Toward this end, we introduce a scalable overlay network architecture and signaling mechanism that permits dynamic program insertions in live high-quality video streams transmitted over IP networks. We describe the implementation of an application proxy that dynamically inserts prerecorded video programs into NTSC Dl quality motion-JPEG streams with no visible artifacts. We argue that on-demand program switching is merely a first step toward a new generation of media services; increases in computing power ultimately permits network-based proxies to manipulate and augment multimedia content as it flows through the network.