Method and mechanism for vending digital content
View Patent ↗An Internet Box Office (IBO) system and technique vends digital content via a computer network, such as the Internet. The IBO system comprises a viewing system that cooperates with a Digital Rights Management system and various deployment enhancements within the Internet to provide an infrastructure that facilitates access to digital content in a manner that comports with copyright law and the control of intellectual property by the copyright owner. The IBO system enables a content copyright owner to retain control of its intellectual property while allowing a consumer to have transparent access to the copyright-protected content via the network. To that end, the IBO system operates to download and stage the copyrighted digital content on the viewing system of a consumer.
1. A method, comprising:
intercepting a request for content, wherein the content resides on a media server, and wherein the request is intercepted on a device that is independent of the media server and the device serves as a front-end to the media server, and wherein the device is a collection of caches, switches, routers, and hubs organized as a deployment enhancement product offering to accelerate delivery of the content from the media server and reduce load associated with vending the content from the media server;
pre-downloading the content into a staging area of the device, wherein the content is acquired off of the media server; and
delivering the content from the staging area of the device to a requestor of the content when the requestor is to receive the content.
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein pre-downloading further includes acquiring the content within cache from the media server on behalf of the requestor and in advance of delivering the content to that requestor, and wherein the cache is the staging area.
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein delivering further includes providing the content in an encrypted format to the requestor from the staging area.
4. The method of claim 1 further comprising, selecting the staging area in response to a request and a connection between the requestor and an available staging area over a network.
5. The method of claim 1 further comprising, simultaneously delivering the content to one or more additional requestors from the staging area.
6. The method of claim 1 , wherein delivering further includes receiving a download request from a download manager associated with the requestor indicating that the requestor is scheduled to immediately receive the content.
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein downloading further includes streaming the content to a media player associated with the requestor.