Patent ID: 8145570

Claim:
A method, comprising: evaluating schedules for content delivery to clients; identifying one or more staging areas for the content in response to proximities of the one or more staging areas to the clients, the staging areas are a collection of network caches in closer physical proximity to the clients than servers originally having the content for distribution, the collection of network caches residing on devices located on site at web-hosting data centers having the content, the staging areas also each include switches, routers, and hubs for delivering the content to the clients; and acquiring the content in the one or more staging areas from the servers for subsequent delivery to the clients in response to the schedules, the schedules account for a time to download the content to the clients and bandwidth used to download the content to the clients from the one or more staging areas, and wherein the schedules dictate the same content is downloaded as a convoy stream to all of the clients, and a speed with which the download is achieved in the convoy stream is reduced to account for a particular speed of a slowest member of the convoy stream.