Patent ID: 7908624

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a television broadcast at a first settop box, wherein the television broadcast comprises at least one program; establishing a connection between the first settop box and a network device for a session according to a network protocol; receiving time-ordered digital media data packets encoding the at least one program into a buffer; defining a packet header template having a plurality of static fields filled with static values valid for all packets sent from the first settop box to the network device during a relaying session and variable fields that can acquire packet-dependent values for different packets sent during the session; storing the packet header template and the static values in a memory; creating a packet header based on the header template by defining, in a central processing unit, at least one value of a variable field and by reusing the static values from the memory for the static fields; adding the network header to the digital media data packets, wherein adding the network header to the digital media data packets includes pre-pending the packet header created based on the header template to payload data from the buffer to form the packets to be relayed to the network device; relaying the digital media data packets to a network device connected to the first settop box through a network, wherein the packets are relayed substantially without latency and with a time-ordering based on the same time-ordering of the packets in the buffer; receiving acknowledgment packets from the network device acknowledging the reception of the relayed digital media data packets; and in response to the receiving acknowledgement packets, freeing space in the buffer that was used to buffer for the acknowledged data packets.