Improving medium-sized media clip distribution through transparent tail synchronization

The emergence of popular video sharing sites such as YouTube has created a tremendous content shift towards timely, medium-sized media together with placing significant demands on the network. While techniques such as Application Layer Multicast and P2P streaming offer the potential to reduce the impact of general streaming content, the difficulty in imposing synchronization and the heavy asymmetry of clients nullify the majority of the respective benefits of the techniques. In this paper, we propose a method, transparent tail synchronization, that discovers latent opportunities for synchronization from the tail of the content to take advantage of efficient distribution techniques. Our approach maximizes savings at the content provider while operating in a straightforward and easily deployable manner. We describe how tail synchronized media distribution can offer savings across a wide range of asymmetry at the end clients.