the techniques related to providing a live program over the internet are described . according to one aspect of the techniques , a data stream representing a live program is preprocessed to produce a plurality of substreams , each of the substreams comprising decimated samples of the data stream . the number of substreams is relatively large so that the bandwidth requirement for delivering one of the substreams is relatively low . with a group of seeding boxes receiving the substreams , a group of boxes in services are designated to receive the substreams from the seeding boxes , each of these boxes including the seeding boxes is able to support multiple outbound streams so that there are enough data suppliers to service the ordering boxes or colonize more boxes to become the data suppliers . as a result , a live program can be timely serviced by peer boxes , significantly reducing the computation and bandwidth burdens on a server .