DELTACASTING FOR LIVE CONTENT

Methods, apparatuses, and systems are provided for improving utilization of a communications system (e.g., a satellite communications system) when handling live content requests. Embodiments use various techniques (e.g., dictionary coding techniques) to create fingerprints of content traversing the links of the communications system. These fingerprints are used to identify and exploit opportunities for using multicasting to share forward-link capacity by collapsing multiple, substantially identical live content session streams into fewer shared session streams (e.g., a single shared session stream).