Tailored transmissions for efficient near-video-on-demand service

Near-video-on-demand (NVOD) entails the provision of viewing flexibility that approaches that of VOD to an unlimited number of viewers of a “hot” movie at a fixed cost to the provider. This presents an exciting opportunity to service providers, especially when employing broadcast channels such as cable television and satellites. Unlike previous NVOD schemes, which were all highly structured we employ an algorithmic approach to produce tailor-made transmission schemes that dominate all previous ones in both resource consumption and flexibility. The ability to tailor the transmissions to match resource availability is often key to the practicality of the service in a given environment. The design algorithms have been coded, and a prototype has been constructed