Patent ID: 7640353

Claim:
A computer-implemented method, comprising: identifying a quantity of segments of a media file to be prefetched; generating a usage model reflecting expected next segments a user will seek when accessing a media file, the usage model including one of: an empirical usage model statistically summarizing usage data representing a manner in which prior users have accessed segments of a media file, an initial usage model representing a predicted manner in which users are expected to access segments of the media file, and the initial usage model augmented by the usage data representing the manner in which users have accessed segments of the media file; and identifying a prefetching model from the usage model to reduce a seeking delay in accessing one or more next segments by prefetching one or more expected next segments identified from the usage model, wherein identifying the prefetching model includes: representing the usage model as a probability function of a user seeking a particular segment, wherein the probability function is a function including representations of: access occurrences for each segment, seeking occurrences for each segment, and both the access occurrences and the seeking occurrences for each segment, wherein the probability function p(x) includes: p ( x )= C×P p ( X )× P s ( x ) where: x represents each of the segments of the media file, C represents a normalization factor, P p (x) represents the access occurrences for each segment x, and P s (x) represents the seeking occurrences for each segment x, and deriving the prefetching model from the usage model to minimize a seeking distance; and prefetching the segments in accordance with the prefetching model.