Patent ID: 7620699

Claim:
A method for providing high bandwidth data between one or more publishing systems and one or more consuming systems, comprising: providing a presence server, wherein the presence server is coupled to a network; providing a plurality of data servers; receiving, with the presence server, a request to publish content from a publishing system; selecting a data server from among the plurality of data servers to be a publishing target data server, wherein the data server is selected as being a least busy data server of the plurality of data servers; determining, with the presence server, if the data server was provided as publishing target data server for a publishing system of the one or more publishing systems within a predetermined recent period and if the data server was not provided as a publishing target data server within the predetermined recent period, directing the publishing system to transmit content from the publishing system to the data server, and further wherein the content is received and stored by the data server; receiving, with the presence server, a first one or more requests to receive or retrieve content transmitted from one or more consuming systems; providing or transmitting information to each consuming system of the one or more consuming systems for enabling each consuming system of the one or more consuming systems to establish a direct connection via a computer network between data server and each consuming system of the one or more consuming systems; providing or transmitting the content to each consuming system of the one or more consuming systems in response to the first one or more requests to receive or retrieve content received from each consuming system of the one or more consuming systems; instructing the publishing system to stop transmitting the content to the data server when all of the one or more consuming systems stops viewing the content provided by or from the publishing system; and instructing the publishing system to wait until a second one or more requests to receive or retrieve content is received.