Reducing bandwidth consumption at startup of media transmissions

One of the primary objectives for media-on-demand systems is the reduction of bandwidth requirements. In this article we show a way how some bandwidth can be saved at the beginning of a media stream transmission. This saving is accomplished by omitting segments at their first transmission if the second transmission is in due time. To increase the number of omissions we propose an algorithm which optimizes the transmission schedule for this aim without modifying its maximum bandwidth requirement. Index Terms--Interactive TV, media-on-demand, media transmission startup, proactive broadcasting protocols, video-on-demand.