Patent ID: 8887218

Claim:
A method of adjusting bitrate among multiple media streams delivered on a common subscriber connection, comprising: receiving information describing a maximum bitrate provisioned on the subscriber connection; receiving a plurality of media streams, each of the plurality of media streams utilizing a corresponding bitrate, and the plurality of media streams having a combined bitrate; determining, by a statistical multiplexer, in a real-time bitrate requirement for each of the plurality of media streams using statistical multiplexing and assigning at least one of the plurality of media streams, a new bitrate consistent with the determined real time bitrate requirement and the combined bitrate; adjusting, by the statistical multiplexer at the switch, the corresponding bitrate of the at least one of the plurality of media streams based on the assigned new bitrate by partially decoding and then re-encoding the at least one of the plurality of media streams, wherein adjusting the bandwidth further comprises generating complexity information comprising encoding level of the media stream; and sending the complexity information along with the adjusted bitrate to the statistical multiplexer, wherein the statistical multiplexer is configured to trade bandwidth between the plurality of media streams based on the complexity information, the real-time bitrate requirement, and the combined bitrate.