METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTENT DISTRIBUTION VIA NON-HOMOGENEOUS ACCESS NETWORKS

摘要

A method and apparatus for streaming content to an access network in an interactive information distribution system (100). The method initially encapsulates the content in accordance to an Internet Protocol (IP). In one embodiment, the content is configured as a plurality of a MPEG-2 packets contained in a payload of a Realtime Transport Protocol (RTP) packet (352 - 356) that is contained in an IP packet (300). The content is then transcoded into a format supported by the access network, and streamed over a distribution network to a remote server (201) or to a subscriber terminal th at is coupled to the access network (104). The apparatus is embodied as at leas t one stream caching server (102) for streaming said content as an Internet Protocol (IP) packet to at least one access network via a stream distributio n network in response to a request for content, where the content is encapsulated within the IP packet. A packet processor (144) is coupled to th e at least one stream server for processing the encapsulated content within th e IP packets into at least one packet in a format native to the at least one access network.