"The Internet is set to revolutionize TV within the next five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets", Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum, 2007.

As noted by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the abundance of video contents online will drastically change the TV watching population's viewing habits. Various surveys noted that the global market for IP delivery of video entertainment will blossom in exponential pace, with revenue exceeding $7 billion and IPTV subscriber base exceeding 60 million by 2010. All these forecasts point to a booming entertainment sector delivered over the IP network.

Unfortunately, video delivered over the Internet still have shortcomings to overcome, such as unpredictable quality for live and VoD streaming, and excessively long duration for file downloading. This is mainly due to the original design of the Internet, which did not have time-sensitive, quality-centric media delivery in mind.

In a typical client/server model of media delivery, there are several bottle-necks that the content providers must address in order to serve a massive number of customers. As indicated in Figure 1, suppose an Internet Content Provider (ICP) is serving a number of (N) customers from the same subnet of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). As such, N unicast video sessions originating from the ICP's server must be established to deliver the video to the N clients. It creates burdens at the server capacity, the server side's upstream bandwidth, as well as the Internet bandwidth at the clients' ISP.

Packaged as software modules deployed at the video server and client, the CFMD offers a scalable video delivery solution for ICP. The CFMD-related software is simply application modules for standard networking software, the use of which offers a much lower cost entry barrier. The standard-based, open architecture also allows easy adaptation/integration with other delivery technologies, such as Peer-to- Peer.

The block diagram of CFMD software on both the client and server sides is illustrated in Figure 2. On the server device, the CFMD-specific module is simply an application server located next to a standard HTTP server, transforming the media stream/file into a standard-based format for network transmission. On the client device, the CFMD-specific client receives the video from the network, processes this particular standard-based format, and feeds the regular media stream to the legacy media player. Enhancements in performance stem from taking advantage of the standard cache resources within the ISP's subnet.