Patent ID: 8516082

Claim:
A content delivery network (CDN) for dynamically serving a content object over the Internet to an end user system, the CDN comprising: a content object request function that receives a request for streaming content object to the end user system; a plurality of points of presence (POPs), wherein: the plurality of POPs are geographically distributed; the plurality of POPs include a POP, and each of the plurality of POPs comprises a plurality of servers including an edge server; an edge server selection function that assigns the request to the edge server in the POP, wherein: the edge server loads a plurality of publishing points, and each publishing point of the plurality of publishing points maps a request for content to a content source, and each publishing point of the plurality of publishing points is based on an actual or predicted request for the content; a purging function that automatically identifies and removes a subset of the plurality of publishing points according to an algorithm; a publishing-point discovery function that: correlates the request to a publishing point associated with the content object, determines whether the publishing point is loaded into the edge server, and queries a remote location away from the edge server to determine the content source if the publishing point is not loaded into the edge server; and a streaming function that streams the content object to the end user system.