Grid casting

Grid casting or gridcasting is a file and stream sharing system that cooperates transparently by using idle bandwidth on a user's computer to deliver large scale live or on-demand broadcasts. Grid casting is used for the purpose of improving performance, scalability, and cost efficiency, of delivering files and streams to end users through the use of a media plug-in.

Grid casting is similar to peer-to-peer file sharing systems such as BitTorrent, but has the advantage of providing a robust live or on-demand streaming solution. The original high bit-rate stream is split up into smaller bit-rate streams that are shared through users computers, by incorporating a plug-in, that reconstructs the smaller streams back to the original high bit-rate stream.

Grid casting constructs several smaller data streams a lower bit-rates from an original higher bit-rate stream. In grid casting, none of the data streams are identical.

As an example, assume the live stream is a 400 kbit/s signal and the gridcasting solution constructs multiple data streams at a size of 100 kbit/s. Now, an end user receiving any four of the different data streams at 100 kbit/s may use these four data streams to construct the original live stream back to 400 kbits/s, and thus the movie can be played in real time at the end user.

http://en.wikipedia.org/