Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate relocating an IP buffer from a conventional location in a user device handset to a radio-access network (RAN) interface in order to reduce acquisition delay in the user device. By performing IP buffering at the transmission side of a forward link transmission, acquisition time can be reduced by approximately 5-7 seconds. Additionally, a physical layer aware encoder can be employed, which has knowledge of transmission constraints associated with, for example, a conventional DVB-H transmission protocol, and can parse streaming media into 1-second segments that can be pre-packaged in a current superframe for display at a subsequent time.