Patent ID: 8181210

Claim:
A system for delivery of content from one or more content sources to a plurality of subscriber units, comprising: a flow transport subsystem that transports content flows originated from the one or more content sources over a wide area network in response to one or more requests for deadline-driven content flows, wherein the deadline-driven content flows are transported over parallel overlay networks running over an underlying IP network, said parallel overlay networks sharing state information with each other; said state information being associated with multiple identified flows amongst at least two overlay processes that maintain at least two overlay networks; one or more gateways that interface with the flow transport subsystem for receiving deadline-driven content flows, each of the one or more gateways being associated with one or more subscriber units, said one or more gateways being selected based on one or more requests for deadline-driven content flows; a content processor that converts the deadline-driven content flows to modulated content flows; a flow delivery subsystem that delivers the modulated content flows to one or more subscriber units associated with a selected gateway over an allocated frequency bandwidth of one or more transmission mediums, wherein the flow delivery subsystem delivers the modulated content flows only to those one or more subscriber units that generate one or more content requests which initiate the one or more requests for deadline-driven content flow; and a request processing node that receives at least one request from one or more subscriber units and routes such request to the selected gateway, wherein the selected gateway initiates a content request to one of the plurality of content sources over the wide area network.