Patent ID: 8869218

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, at a media server, a request from a computing device for a portion of a particular rendition of a plurality of renditions of a video on demand item that are available for adaptive streaming, wherein the request is received while the media server has access to a single rendition of the video on demand item, wherein each of the plurality of renditions has a distinct bitrate, and wherein the plurality of renditions, one or more transcoding parameters, and one or more adaptive streaming parameters are identified by a transcoding template stored at the media server; when the portion is part of the single rendition, sending the portion retrieved from the single rendition to the computing device in response to the request; when the portion is not part of the single rendition: when the portion is stored in a cache of the media server, sending the portion retrieved from the cache to the computing device in response to the request; and when the portion is not stored in the cache at the media server: generating the portion by transcoding a corresponding portion of the single rendition based on the one or more transcoding parameters and the one or more adaptive streaming parameters; storing the generated portion in the cache; and sending the generated portion to the computing device in response to the request; and removing portions of one or more outdated renditions from the cache.