Patent ID: 7930449

Claim:
A method for distributing data from a switch/router to an intermediate device connected to one or more user devices, wherein the intermediate device is configured to decode the data and to present the decoded data to the one or more user devices, the method comprising: retaining hierarchical data received from a data source in a buffer of the switch/router, wherein the hierarchical data is sequential data in which use of future data depends on previous data; selecting a fixed data transmission rate for the retained hierarchical data in the buffer of the switch/router; providing initial hierarchical data from the buffer of the switch/router to the intermediate device at the fixed data transmission rate, the initial hierarchical data including an access point to enable decoding of hierarchical data, the access point decodable without reference to other hierarchical data; and providing additional hierarchical data from the buffer of the switch/router to the intermediate device at the fixed data transmission rate.