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02119693 Engebretsen, Lars Sudan, Madhu Harmonic broadcasting is optimal. Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms, San Francisco, CA, USA, January 6--8, 2002. Philadelphia, PA: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) (ISBN 0-89871-513-X/pbk). 431-432 (2002). 2002 Philadelphia, PA: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) EN Zbl 0867.94038 Summary: Harmonic broadcasting was introduced by {\it L.-S. Juhn} and {\it L.-M. Tseng} [Harmonic broadcasting for video-on-demand service, IEEE Trans. Broadcasting 43, 268--271 (1997)] as a way to reduce the bandwidth requirements required for video-on-demand broadcasting. In this paper we note that harmonic broadcasting is actually a special case of the priority encoded transmission scheme introduced by {\it A. Albanese} et al. [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 42, 1737--1744 (1996; Zbl 0867.94038)] and prove -- using an information theoretic argument -- that it is impossible to achieve the design goals of harmonic broadcasting using a shorter encoding.