Abstract: A network and method for efficiently and effectively acquiring broadcast content, such as multimedia data, from content providers and delivering the acquired content to end users via a tiered network to minimize congestion during content delivery to thus provide high quality of service. The network and method employs a tiered Internet-based network that is served by a hybrid satellite/optical fiber data distribution network. The network includes a data center to which data, such as streaming video, audio or multimedia data, is provided over a content acquisition network by content providers. The data center uplinks the data to at least one satellite, such as a geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO) satellite, and over an Internet or asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, which distributes the data to the servers in the tiered network. The tiered network in this example comprises three tiers, although any number of tiers is acceptable.

Abstract: A system and method for writing to a disk in real-time at a bitrate which allows streaming of the same payloads over a network connection that supports the same or substantially the same bitrate. The system and method are capable of performing the mirroring or data replication for applications that write to a disk at different or slower rates than other applications in the network. The system and method can employ digital encoders that are advantageous in that they are operable to write to a disk at a specific and substantially constant rate that produce predictable and consistent results. A disk driver employed in the system and method enables an application to read and write to a disk as if it were a normal disk drive. As the application reads and writes content to the disk drive, the network transparently broadcasts the content via TCP/IP to remote listening devices, such as edge servers in the network.