Patent ID: 8862766

Claim:
A method comprising: at a first network device in data communication with a plurality of second network devices, each respective second network device having respective data processing attributes, receiving from two or more second network devices of the plurality of second network devices respective messages, the respective messages including information about respective data processing attributes of a respective second network device; at the first network device, generating a message which includes information aggregating the information about the respective data processing attributes received from the two or more second network devices, the message comprising identification data identifying respective second network devices of the two or more network devices and data identifying the respective data processing attributes of the identified respective second network devices; communicating the message from the first network device to a source network device; subsequently, receiving at the first network device respective requests for respective multimedia content from the two or more second network devices; communicating one or more messages from the first network device to the source network device requesting delivery of the respective multimedia content; receiving at the first network device from the source network device a scalable coded datastream comprising a plurality of respective subset datastreams, the respective subset datastream formed by the source network device using the identification data identifying the respective second network devices and the data identifying the respective data processing attributes of the two or more second network devices; and communicating the respective subset datastreams to the two or more second network devices.