This paper proposes a new architecture, called intelligent network attached storage, for building a distributed video server. In this architecture, the data intensive and high overhead processing tasks such as data packaging and transmitting are handled locally at the storage nodes instead of at special delivery nodes. Thus an unnecessary data trip from the storage nodes to the delivery nodes is avoided, and a large amount of resource consumption is saved. Moreover, these “intelligent” storage nodes work cooperatively to give a single system image to the clients. Based on the architecture, we design our admission control and stream scheduling strategies, and conduct some simulation experiments to optimize the system design. The simulation results exhibit a near linear scalability of system performance with our design. Some implementation issues are also discussed in this paper.