Bandwidth allocation for interactive video-on-demand

Video-on-demand in education is used in a very different way to entertainment video. Usage is much more interactive. Viewers will frequently pause, fast-forward, skip and view frame-by-frame. Designing a network and server able to support interactivity and make efficient use of bandwidth is difficult. In this paper we suggest that in designing a system neither the network nor the server can be considered in isolation, but must be designed so as to take advantage of each others features. We present some preliminary data on interactive behaviour obtained during our video-on-demand trials and use it to illustrate the theoretical treatment of two different system designs