Combining pay-per-view and video-on-demand services

Most efforts aimed at reducing the costs of video-on-demand services have focussed on reducing the cost of distributing the top ten to twenty videos by broadcasting them in a periodic fashion rather than waiting for individual requests. Unfortunately nearly all existing VoD broadcasting protocols require client set-top boxes (STB) to include enough local storage to store up to 55 percent of each video being viewed. Here we present a novel VoD broadcasting protocol that does not make that demand. Our dual broadcasting protocol can accommodate clients who do not have any storage device in their STB while providing a much lower maximum waiting time to customers whose STB includes a disk drive. We also discuss two possible extensions to this new protocol. One of them is aimed at reducing the bandwidth requirements of the protocol while the other extends the functionality of the VoD service by providing reverse and fast forward controls.