Patent ID: 8887215

Claim:
A method for combining assets for a streaming video signal in a video-on-demand environment, comprising: providing, for each of a plurality of video programs, several versions of each of the video programs comprised of sets of fragmented files pre-encoded at correspondingly different bit rates, codecs or resolutions in an adaptive bit rate format, each set of the fragmented files being identified in a corresponding manifest file; providing, for each of a plurality of additional video content files, several versions of each of the additional video content files comprised of sets of fragmented files pre-encoded at correspondingly different bit rates, codecs or resolutions in an adaptive bit rate format, each set of the fragmented files of the additional video content files being identified in a corresponding additional manifest file; the manifest files and the additional manifest files identifying a source location of the corresponding sets of video fragments and additional video fragments; providing an asset list identifying the video programs and the additional video content files as video assets; providing a stitcher for ingesting the asset list, the manifest files, and the additional manifest files and responding with a stitched manifest, the stitched manifest comprising identifiers for one or more of the video fragments or the additional video fragments of one or more of the video assets; providing the stitched manifest to a client in response to a client request for the stitched manifest; and using said stitched manifest at the client to request the one or more fragments of the video assets in sequence for sequential playback as one continuous video stream in an order specified by the stitched manifest; the identifiers comprising uniform resource locators (URLs) which are used to identify the video fragments and the additional video fragments in the stitched manifest; creating a new URL for each video fragment and each additional video fragment; creating one of a database or a fixed mapping associating the new URL with an original URL for each video fragment and additional video fragment; combining the new URLs for the video fragments and additional video fragments on the stitched manifest; receiving the client request at the stitcher; identifying the original URL associated with the new URL at the stitcher; and requesting the video fragment or additional video fragment corresponding to the identified new URL from the source location via the stitcher.