Patent ID: 8510787

Claim:
A method for providing broadcast TV channels from an access node to a plurality of decoders, said method comprising: multicasting the TV channels to the decoders from the access node; determining, during a sliding time period, statistics of how many times each multicast TV channel was activated by the plurality of decoders at the access node; listing the multicast TV channels in an ordered list in an order based on the number of activations; identifying one or more provisioned TV channels from the ordered list and adding one or more of the identified TV channels to a set of locally served TV channels; computing the bandwidth consumed by the added, identified provisioned TV channels; adding an additional swappable TV channel, not previously identified and associated with the statistics of the highest number of activations, from the ordered list to the set of locally served TV channels; computing a total bandwidth consumed by the additional swappable TV channel and the provisioned TV channels; repeating said adding and computing steps until the computed total bandwidth reaches a predetermined bandwidth threshold; storing the set of locally served TV channels at the access node; dynamically changing the set of locally served TV channels stored at the access node by changing the provisioned TV channels using the statistics collected over a long time period and changing the swappable TV channels using the statistics collected over a short time period; and upon receiving a TV channel request associated with a selected TV channel within the stored set of locally served TV channels from one of the plurality of decoders, unicasting the selected TV channel to said one of the plurality of decoders.