Patent ID: 8539532

Claim:
A retransmission manager for a digital content delivery system, the digital content delivery system comprising: a plurality of user devices, a set of content providers for delivering digital content to the user devices in bursts of content, through a source unit, wherein the retransmission manager is connected to the user devices to receive notifications therefrom, each notification received from a given user device identifying a burst received by the given user device which is a candidate for retransmission, and wherein each notification identifying a given burst further includes a time to live parameter related to the given burst and indicating a time limit up to which the burst can be retransmitted before being discarded, wherein the retransmission manager selects a set of bursts among the bursts identified by the notifications based on an amount of available bandwidth at the source unit on negotiation messages received from at least one of the plurality of content providers, the negotiation message being related to at least one burst identified in the notifications and including, for each burst, a negotiation parameter; and the retransmission manager sends a request for retransmission of the selected bursts to the source unit.