A SYSTEM FOR OPTIMIZING VIDEO ON DEMAND TRANSMISSION BY PARTITIONING VIDEO PROGRAM INTO MULTIPLE SEGMENTS, DECREASING TRANSMISSION RATE FOR SUCCESSIVE SEGMENTS AND REPEATEDLY, SIMULTANEOUSY TRANSMISSION

A system and method for Near Video On Demand (NVOD) transmission of a program from a server to a plurality of clients. The program is partitioned into segments. Each segment is transmitted repeatedly, with the transmission rate of segments subsequent to the first segment being lower than the transmission rate of the first segment. The transmission of the segments is scheduled in a manner that minimizes the aggregate transmission bandwidth, subject to constraints related to client parameters such as client storage capacity and client recording rates. Preferably, the sequences are partitioned further into subsequences, and redundant subsequences are used for error correction. Preferably, the segments, or the subsegments, include metadata such as segment or subsegment length, segment or subsegment sequence number, or the time until the next transmission of the sequence or subsequence.