Seamless channel transition for popular video broadcasting

The principal goal of near video-on-demand system is to minimize the average user waiting time. The user waiting time of popular videos can be reduced significantly by using broadcasting schemes such as fast broadcasting. Instead of allocating channels uniformly to all the videos, channels are nonuniformly distributed according to the relative popularity of the videos to minimize the average user waiting time. Since the demand for videos changes from time to time, the number of channels allocated to a video needs to be changed dynamically. The channel transition should be seamless so that the users currently watching the video do not experience any disruption due to this transition. Existing seamless channel transition scheme pads a dummy video stream at the end of the original video stream to produce exact correspondence between segments, but this approach causes some wastage of bandwidth. This paper proposes an improved seamless channel transition scheme which minimizes the wastage of bandwidth by preloading a postfix of the original video stream in the client buffer.