Described herein is a technology facilitating the presentation of digital video streams. An implementation, described herein, reduces the effective start-up delay in the presentation of the first frames of the video content that occurs when a system tunes into a video stream by streaming at least an additional stream parallel with the main multicast stream. The alternative parallel stream having offset start points from the main multicast stream to more quickly provide a picture in response to a tuning command. This abstract itself is not intended to limit the scope of this patent. The scope of the present invention is pointed out in the appending claims.