Patent ID: 7840680

Claim:
A method for broadcast-like content streaming, comprising: encoding essentially sequential segments of content into erasure-coded fragments after the segments are made available by a streaming source; wherein erasure-coding denotes a process in which a sequence of erasure-coded fragments are generated from a segment such that the segment can be reconstructed from essentially any subset of the erasure-coded fragments of size not smaller than the size of the segment; thereafter, distributing the fragments for storage on a plurality of fractional-storage servers, each configured to store at least one erasure-coded fragment but less than the minimum amount of fragments or data required to reconstruct the segments; and thereafter, obtaining a set of the fragments usable for reconstructing the segments from at least two of the fractional-storage servers by an assembling device using a fragment pull protocol, each fragment pull request associated with a specific segment, and the erasure-coded fragments obtained by the assembling device from the at least two fractional-storage servers are of essentially the same erasure-coding and therefore the erasure-coded fragments can be decoded together; wherein obtaining the fragments occurs on-the-fly and before fragments associated with at least one following segment of the content are being distributed.