A signi cant driver for the consumer use of high bandwidth in the near future will be interactive video on demand (IVOD). A range of service types can be deployed, based on a di ering sophistication, which must be traded against the network costs (bandwidth) and component costs (switch complexity and memory). The potential aggregate bandwidth required is huge (O(1Pbps)), and thus it is essential to properly engineer the network to reduce the bandwidth required. This paper describes a variety of IVOD scenarios, and introduces a cost function that captures the combined bandwidth and storage requirements of the network. This cost function is used to compare di erent network engineering alternatives, particularly program caching and stream sharing. The e ects of nonlinear pricing and di ering weights of bandwidth and storage are also re ected by the cost function. This cost function can be used by network designers to determine optimal topology, sharing,

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