Media distribution and management system and apparatus

1. A network appliance which engages with internet infrastructure to deliver and control digital content including (but not limited to) streamed and downloaded digital content to digital devices including (but not limited to) television display units, video display units and the like forming an intelligent node in a mesh network and operable in conjunction with a plurality of like network appliances;

said network appliance receiving digital content from a remote location of a distributed storage arrangement; the distributed storage arrangement comprising storage locations at the origin store and/or any of the individual network appliances forming the intelligent nodes; said network appliance including decoding and recoding means by which digital content is downloaded, decoded then recoded for on-transmission to a digital device local to said network appliance for consumption by a user by way of said digital device;

said network appliance forming an intelligent node in a mesh network of said like network appliances;

each said network appliance communicating over the mesh network with reference to network addresses;

wherein each network appliance operates according to secure peer assist routing criteria, including the use of secure protocols for data transmission; said secure peer assist routing criteria enabling reception of at least portions of said item of content from others of said plurality of network appliances if said item of content has been previously downloaded to said others of said plurality of network appliances;

and wherein each said network appliance receives said digital content from the network address from where the next digital bit or group of bits can most easily and efficiently be acquired in order to maintain real-time or near real-time delivery of digital content;

and wherein the digital content is recoded according to secure coding algorithms;

and wherein each said network appliance receives said digital content according to said secure peer assist routing criteria comprising one or more of:

a. most needed packet

b. fastest download speed

c. least latency;

d. the network address from where the next digital bit or group of bits can most easily and efficiently be acquired in order to maintain real-time or near real-time delivery of digital content;

said digital content being obtained from

a. the local network appliance feed or

b. a peer feed or

c. server feed

based on distributed and/or centralized routing information in the form of hash tables or other efficient database mechanisms;

said routing information stored in the form of lookup tables;

the network appliance thereby combining the distributed and/or centralised routing information and intelligence down to video packet level with the lookup tables and network protocols such as SCTP, TCP/IP, UDP, video packet level and other protocols thereby enabling optimum management of the network with Software Defined Network, SDN, like capability.

2. The network appliance of claim 1 wherein said network appliance receives additional securing data from an independent server for the purposes of securely authenticating a network appliance and a customer to allow purchase and delivery of content via the Internet to the appliance and the customer.

3. The network appliance of claim 1 , implemented using a virtual machine environment giving direct hardware access to an operating system.