Access to movies ranging from very popular movies to unpopular movies is managed by configuring sets of data movers for associated movie rankings, reserving data mover local cache resources for the most popular movies, reserving a certain number of streams for popular movies, negotiating with a client for selection of available movie titles during peak demand when resources are not available to start any freely-selected movie in disk storage, and managing disk bandwidth and primary and local cache memory and bandwidth resources for popular and unpopular movies. The assignment of resources to movie rankings may remain the same while the rankings of the movies are adjusted, for example, during off-peak hours. A movie locked in primary cache and providing a source for servicing a number of video streams may be demoted from primary cache to disk in favor of servicing one or more streams of a higher-ranking movie.