Short-delay playback and high reliability content delivery through chain-casting

In this report, we present a delivery method of the chain-casting type optimized for users of media-streaming in the P2P environment. A tree structure is used with chain-casting between users, and the users are given an incentive to form many branches. The high-volume users thus form chain-casting trees which are better dispersed over the network than is the case with other content-delivery systems (CDNs) that carries commercial content has to include digital rights management (DRM), authentication, and billing facilities. Chain-casting is unsuitable for these tasks. In this method, a broker provides control of DRM, authentication, and billing. In typical chain-casting, the further an end-branch is from the root, the longer it takes to start viewing the required content. The method includes a function that breaks the content up into short blocks so that end-branch users are able to start viewing the content earlier than they would otherwise be able to-each block also includes redundant packets as a countermeasure for packet loss.