upon the type of content and alternative uses of the bandwidth for example the gigabit ethernet network 04 is a branching hierarchy such that each mds node is capable upon connection to the gigabit ethernet network 04 of receiving content as streamed through a prior node a benefit of this topology is the elimination of the need for cabling expensive fiber optic rollout to each node or other analog content enablers such as encoders decoders signal amplifiers etc using this system numerous streams of content may be provided to numerous multimedia distribution nodes and their corresponding displays along with the multimedia distribution nodes connected to the prior node fig3 is a block diagram depicting the preferred embodiment including the functional elements buses and data paths of an mds node the diagram depicts an example integrated video processor 21 supporting input of compressed and encoded video over a pci bus interface 25 and output of baseband video 28 and audio 29 a separate clock and crystal 24 support the integrated video processor flash memory 31 a serial eeprom 32 and sdram 33 are attached to tie integrated video processor memory bus 26 a different integrated video processor than the one depicted may be selected and may include other interfaces an integrated pci bus controller 22 controls the pci bus 25 the diagram also depicts an example integrated gigabit ethernet processor 23 which features onboard gigabit ethernet media access control mac and copper physical interfaces phy the depicted gigabit ethernet processor supports 4 ieee 802 3ab compliant 1000base t ports 30 the gigabit ethernet processor is connected to the integrated video processor by means of a pci bus interface 25 flash memory 31 a serial eeprom 32 and sdram 33 are attached to tie integrated gigabit ethernet processor memory bus 27 a.