By Tim Elliott, Peter Schwartz, Joseph Weber, Keen Personal Media, Inc.
Cable head-end systems supporting on-demand content delivery applications and other key services operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Service networks need the ability to scale performance to handle large volumes of subscriber requests during high demand periods without creating unwanted delays or incurring prohibitive costs. Additionally, cable system operators need solutions that are scalable while maintaining efficient bandwidth utilization as workloads increase.
For these reasons, the addition of local client storage in the set-top box presents tremendous benefits to the system operator. One of the many key features of local storage will be the ability to offer customers true video-on-demand: a value-added service already familiar to the customer. This paper will explore the benefits of managing the delivery of content traffic to several client devices with local storage. The result is a video-on-demand service with higher availability, easier manageability, and greater scalability than previous solutions.