ENHANCED VIDEO PROGRAMMING SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING A DISTRIBUTED COMMUNITY NETWORK

摘要

A distributed community network (200) for providing services to an arbitrari ly large community of end users (204, 206, 208) by distributing the load among many machines. The network uses hubs (220, 222, 224) on the machines for routing packets. The packets include content for the machines based upon a particular network service, such as a chat service (218) for permitting user s to interact in chat rooms or a push/pull service (228) for pushing content t o the user machines either directly or based upon information received from th e users.