Method and apparatus for broadcasting media objects with guaranteed quality of service

An apparatus for providing a media object over a connection comprising:

• a media server having:
• a fragmenter that fragments the media object into a plurality Km of segments, the segments having a sequence from a first segment to a last segments, the media object having a plurality Nm of frames of media data, the fragment including initialization logic to initialize the fragmentation to Km=Nm segments, each segment containing one frame:
• means for determining a corresponding bandwidth required to download each segment and means for combining two successive segments in the sequence into a new segment so as to minimize a total variance between the corresponding bandwidth for each of the Km segments, the media object;
• a plurality of streamers, each streamer being coupled to the fragmenter for receiving a respective one of the plurality of segments, each streamer being operable to periodically and continuously provide a stream of media data associated with its corresponding segment on the connection;
• and
• a media client coupled to the streamers to receive the streams of media data, the media client being operable to selectively cause media content from certain of the streams to be downloaded to the media client from the connection in accordance with the fragmentation of the media object and a number of streams that the media client can simultaneously receive for downloading, the media client being operable to cause media content from another stream corresponding to a successive segment in the sequence to be downloaded to the media client from the connection mediately upon the completion of downloading all the data corresponding to a previous segment.