The head-ends and last-mile costs for an IPTV network were prohibitive in the past, compared to the ARPU which could be realized. Special purpose video streaming servers were needed, whose cost depended on the number of users which were simultaneously served.

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The iCDN architecture eliminates all these limitations by reducing the cost of an head-end by an order of magnitude. This is possible by deploying plenty of vanilla PC servers with gigabyte Ethernet links, for serving contents and channels to the iSTBs. Each PC server can have a bank oflow-cost, terabyte SATA drives.A head-end can start with a modest size, and can increase the ser'Vers and storage according to increasing demands of users. The head-end can also push caching servers nearer to users, to improve the performance. Head-ends can be giving contents on "Demand" or can push them to iSTBs through "Broadcast". A Demand Head-end is connected to iSTBs through two-way broadband net-