Patent ID: 7546355

Claim:
A method for providing streamed electronic content to a plurality of user terminals in a client network from at least one remote electronic content source, the method comprising: receiving at a client-side computer requests from two or more user terminals in the client network for a common desired streamed content from the at least one remote electronic content store; said client-side computer forwarding at least one content request to the at least one remote electronic content store for the common desired streamed content; receiving by the client-side computer from the at least one content source a streamed unicast transmission of the requested content in response to said at least one content request; said client-side computer distributing the received streamed content corresponding to said streamed unicast transmission to each of the requesting plurality of user terminals in the client network; and said client-side computer being operative in terminating the content transmission being received by the client-side computer from the at least one content source when the client-side computer is not distributing the content to any of the requesting user terminals.