On the design of a low-cost video-on-demand storage system

Recent advances in storage technology, coupled with the dramatic increase in the bandwidth of networks, now make it possible to provide "video-on-demand" service to viewers. A video-on-demand server is a computer system that stores videos in compressed digital form and provides support for various portions of compressed video data to be accessed and transmitted concurrently. We present a low-cost storage architecture for a video-on-demand server that relies principally on disks. The high bandwidths of disks in conjunction with a clever strategy for striping videos on them enables simultaneous access and transmission of portions of a video, separated by fixed time intervals. We also present schemes for implementing VCR-like functions including fast forward, rewind, and pause, and extend our schemes to the case in which videos have different rate requirements.