Patent ID: 7895291

Claim:
A distributed storage and retrieval system comprising: a plurality of storage-and-computing elements, each storage-and-computing element configured to a priori store a plurality of pushed content fragments; where a priori storage of pushed content fragments denotes that pushed content fragments are spread over storage-and-computing elements, which participate in storage of the pushed content fragments, prior to consumption of the pushed content fragments, and regardless of which pushed content fragments the storage-and-computing elements choose to consume; the storage-and-computing elements configured to simultaneously retrieve pushed content fragments from a plurality of storage-and-computing elements; and as a direct result of the priori storage, the distributed storage and retrieval system configured to enable a large number of storage-and-computing elements, which is higher than half available aggregated uplink bandwidth of the storage-and-computing elements divided by average streaming bitrate, to retrieve the pushed content fragments and provide playable streams within less than 1000/R seconds from receiving requests to provide the playable streams, where ‘R’ (expressed in Kbps) denotes average available uplink bandwidth of a storage-and-computing element.