Patent ID: 7296082

Claim:
A method of fault tolerant delivery of live media content, the content being available in a given media format as a stream of data packets, comprising: receiving the stream at each of a set of splitter devices, wherein each splitter is located at a data center; from each splitter device, outputting a copy of each packet in the stream to a set of remote server regions, with each server region including a concentrator device, and a set of media servers associated with the given media format; at each server region, having the concentrator device reassemble the stream of data packets by receiving data packets output from each splitter device and discarding redundant packets, wherein a given data packet is processed within the concentrator device upon its receipt at the concentrator device and, if not discarded, is forwarded from the concentrator device upon such processing without delay; feeding, as a stream of data packets, the data packets forwarded from the concentrator, wherein the stream of data packets is fed to each of the set of media servers associated with the given media format so that each of the set of media servers in the server region is available to provide the stream of data packets; within each server region, at each of the media servers in the set of media servers, receiving the stream of data packets forwarded from the concentrator device; and in response to each end user request that is directed to one of the set of media servers in the server region that has received the stream of data packets forwarded from the concentrator device, outputting the stream of data packets from a given media server in a server region; wherein data packets are delivered from each splitter to each server region via a non-streaming media protocol and the stream of data packets is output from the given media server over a given streaming protocol.