Patent ID: 7788368

Claim:
An intermediary network device located within a service provider network between a content provider and one or more multicast consumers, the network device comprising: a control unit to control operation of the network device; a plurality of interface cards to receive requests from the multicast consumers concerning the consumption of multicast content and, after receiving the requests, the multicast content from the content provider, wherein the plurality of interface cards further forward the received multicast content to the multicast consumers in response to one or more of the requests; a plurality of collector processes executing on the interface cards to collect the requests and communicate the requests to the control unit of the network device; and a collection control process executing on the control unit to aggregate the requests and generate a multicast usage report based on the collected request received from the collector processes executing on the interface cards, wherein the multicast usage report details usage by the consumers of the multicast content provided by the content provider, wherein the collection control process executing on the control unit of the network device communicates a multicast collection schema to the collector processes executing on the interface cards of the network device, wherein the collector processes collect the requests in accordance with the multicast collection schema, wherein the multicast collection schema defines a set of data collection properties to control collection of the requests by the collector processes, wherein the collection control process issues commands to the collector processes to start and stop collection of the requests in accordance with the multicast collection schema, and wherein the multicast usage report comprises a header and a data segment that includes one or more entries corresponding to the collected requests.