Enhanced video programming system and method providing a distributed community network

摘要

A distributed community network (200) provides services to an arbitrarily large community of end users (204, 206, 208) by distributing the load among many machines (210, 212, 214). The network uses hubs (220,222, 224) on the machines for routing packets. The hubs (220, 222, 224) obtain routing instructions from a router (256) and use those instructions for routing the packets. The packets include content for the machines based upon a particular network service, such as a chat service (218) permitting users to interact in chat rooms, or a push/pull service (228) for pushing content to the user machines either directly or based upon information received from the users. IMAGE