Patent ID: 8185809

Claim:
A method of serving a content item from a content server to multiple clients via a network, the method comprising: maintaining concurrent independent sessions between a content server and each of a plurality of clients for conveying the content item to each of the plurality of clients, wherein the number of clients in the plurality of clients can vary over time, and wherein the start of at least one session and the end of at least one session is independent of the start and end of other sessions; receiving a stream of packet payloads by the content server, each packet payload of the stream of packet payloads including a random or pseudorandom set of output symbols encoded with data generated from the content item, wherein each packet payload in at least a subset of the stream of packet payloads includes a different set of data; and transmitting concurrently from the content server each packet payload in the stream of packet payloads to each client of the plurality of clients in corresponding packets, wherein each packet payload transmitted concurrently at any particular time to some or all of the plurality of clients is independent of which packet payloads had been previously correctly received by various ones of the clients, and wherein each of the plurality of clients is capable of reconstructing the content item after correctly receiving a number of different output symbols sufficient in quantity to reconstruct the data generated from the content item to a desired accuracy from those different output symbols.