Patent ID: 8694668

Claim:
A method for execution by a computer, the method comprising: receiving a request to read streaming digital media from a digital dispersed storage network (DDSN), wherein the streaming digital media is encoded in accordance with a scalable streaming media technology to produce a scalable quality streaming digital media, wherein the scalable quality streaming digital media is divided into a plurality of data segments, wherein a data segment of the plurality of data segments is encoded into a set of data slices, and wherein the DDSN stores the scalable quality streaming digital media as a plurality of sets of data slices in slice servers; and for one of the plurality of data segments: determining a number of the slice servers that are available; determining a level of quality of the streaming digital media based on the number of available slice servers; determining a minimum number of data slices of a corresponding set of data slices based on the level of quality; requesting the minimum number of data slices; when the minimum number of data slices is received, decoding the minimum number of data slices to recover the one of the plurality of data segments to produce a recovered data segment; and sending the recovered data segment to a media player for presentation as a part of playback of the streaming digital media.