Cheng et al. describe and discuss GridCast, a video-on-demand system, online since 2006. This system employs peer assistance to improve scalability and continuity. This approach allows GridCast to improve the bit rates, compared with the most popular video-on-demand systems. Special attention is given to scalability and continuity issues arising from the implementation of a multi-video caching technique, one year after the system launch. The experimental results show that the multi-video caching implementation improves both scalability and continuity over single-video caching.

I recommend this paper to specialists in peer-to-peer, video-on-demand, or caching techniques. The peer management description is particularly useful, considering that applying peer-to-peer technology to video-on-demand is not yet done on a large scale. This well-described model of a peer-assisted video-on-demand system can be the foundation of new implementations of similar systems.