With the development of cable TV, satellite TV and the Internet, a new technology called VOD (Video On Demand) was developed. Researches showed that 80% of the demand for movies and TV shows are for something like the 20 most popular movies at the time. Likewise, the demand for VOD is bigger on holidays and weekends than on other dates at the calendar.There are two important conditions which are the core rules for supplying good and reliable service:
1. When user ask for a movie - it is required to supply it as soon as possible.
2. No "Hiccups" is allowed.
These two conditions and the data was given earlier rise a question: how to supply a good and reliable service during peak hours?
This article is one of the earliest articles which deal with broadcasting. Broadcasting rely on the existence of high demand for a few items, therefore the system servers broadcast these items periodicity to all users.
This way the server is not getting loaded and it always broadcast the same amount of data, with no dependence on the amount of users which ask for it.
Using the Pyramid Broadcasting method described in the article, each item is divided into a exponentially growing size segment (i.e. if the first segment is of size 2, the second will be of size 4 and so on). Since the bandwidth reserved for each segment is the same, and the first segment is the smallest - it will be broadcast the largest number of times.
This way, when user asks for a movie it easier for him to start watch it - which is the first condition. Additionaly, before the user consumes the current segment - the following segment would be downloaded.