Patent ID: 8051194

Claim:
A system for streaming multimedia content to a channel-swarm in a peer-to-peer network including a plurality of nodes wherein each node is at least a computing device, comprising: at least one resource node for delivering multimedia content; at least one reliable node for reliably delivering multimedia content, wherein the at least one reliable node is guaranteed to provide multimedia content to connected nodes in the channel-swarm; and at least a consumer node for receiving the multimedia content distributed by the at least one resource node and the at least one reliable node over the channel-swarm, wherein the consumer node, the least one resource node and the at least one reliable node constitute the channel-swarm of a particular broadcast television channel; wherein the consumer node includes a buffer being filled with multimedia content according to a particular order including: by the at least one reliable node filling a first time interval of the buffer with a first portion of the multimedia content; by the at least one resource node filling a second time interval of the buffer with a second portion of the multimedia; and by the at least one reliable node filling a third time interval of the buffer with a third portion of the multimedia content, wherein the third time interval being subsequent to the second time interval and the second time interval being subsequent to the first time interval, and wherein the first portion of multimedia content includes packets that should be used first for the channel-swarm.