A case for grid based video on demand system

Abstract

The Video-on-Demand (VoD) services incorporate streaming of video over network and allow its subscribers to select videos and play them in near real time playback quality including interactive functions like Fast Forward, Rewind, Random Seek, etc. VoD systems put a huge amount of overhead on the processing capabilities of the video server and need an equally huge amount of storage. These systems also demand a highly optimized network backbone for data transfer. Though lot of research have been carried out in the area of VoD distribution and network optimization, the problems of storage and computation have received only cursory attention. Recently, research in the high performance community has led to the development of Grid Computing technologies for precisely the problems stated above. In this paper, we propose and develop the idea of integrating VoD servers with Grid computing and describe the system as Grid based Video on Demand (GDVoD) system. Prototype of GDVoD system has been developed and experiments have been carried out. The experiments highlight the fact that GDVoD system has low overhead in terms of computation without compromising the quality of the streamed video.