Semiconductor memory based server for providing multimedia information on demand over wide area networks

摘要

A method and apparatus for delivering multimedia video data from a server (host processor) to a plurality of clients connected to a communications network. More specifically, with this invention, preprocessed video and multimedia data packets are stored in switches of the network. When a client desires to receive the video and multimedia data, sends a request to the host processor which in turn sends a control message to the switches storing the requested data. These switches in turn send the requested data to the requesting client. If the data is not stored in the switches, the data must then be forwarded directly from the server to the requesting client.