Hybrid and secure scheme for pre-ordered video delivery over low-bandwidth links

Despite efforts to increase access to broadband Internet services nationally and globally, a large number of households remains connected using lower bandwidth connections. At the same time, however, a connected household´s demands for data services (including the typical triple-play services) increases continuously. One of the main drivers in the triple-play service domain is Video-on-Demand (VoD). VoD services today mix realtime streaming (or watching) of content with pre-selection and personal library-building for later consumption. In this contribution, we evaluate the extensive caching of video sequences that were pre-ordered (e.g., added to a personal library with a VoD service provider) under the constraints of low-bandwidth links commonly encountered in rural communities. We find that by combining extensive client-side caching, video coding patterns, and stream-level smoothing at the time of media consumption, our approach enables the delivery of full HD resolution content to connections under 1 Mbps given enough time for pre-caching. Additionally, utilizing the inter-frame dependencies and coding properties of H.264/AVC encodings, our approach disables broad decoding of content from the client-side cache and hence preserves copyrights.