In the case where transferring video data for broadcast in a broadcasting station or the like by using a best-effort-type communication network, a loss of data or a change of image quality will not be permitted, and so a method will not able to be adopted which dynamically changes an encoding rate of the video data, in accordance with traffic of the network. Therefore, it may be necessary to control a transfer amount of the video data, so that a usage band of the video data to be transferred does not exceed the bandwidth of the network.
As an example of this countermeasure, in the case where a LAN bandwidth to which a plurality of clients are connected is insufficient, it has been proposed to perform arbitration between the clients by an arbitration condition set in advance based on a priority order of the clients, priority degrees of the contents, usage bands of the contents and usage times of the contents, and to select a content to be received (for example, refer to Patent Literature 1).