With recent advances in storage and network technology it is now possible to provide movie on demand (MOD) service, eliminating the inflexibility inherent in todays broadcast cable systems. A MOD server is a computer system that stores movies in compressed digital form and provides support for different portions of compressed movie data to be accessed and transmitted concurrently. In this paper, we present a low-cost storage architecture for a MOD server that relies principally on disks. The high bandwidths of disks in conjunction with a clever strategy for striping movies on them is utilized in order to enable simultaneous access and transmission of "certain" different portions of a movie. We also present a wide range of schemes for implementing VCR-like functions.
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