A cooperative distribution protocol for video-on-demand

We present a cooperative distribution protocol requiring clients that watch a video to forward it to the next client. As a result, the video server only has to distribute parts of a video that no client can forward. Our protocol works best when clients have sufficient buffer capacity to store each video they are watching until they are done: when this is the case, the instantaneous server bandwidth never exceeds the video consumption rate. In addition, we also show how multicasting can further reduce the server and the network bandwidth requirements of the protocol.