A media experience policy engine includes three components: an information manager, a policy evaluator, and an enforcement module. The information manager collects information regarding the current state of a media delivery system, such as, for example, usage of a CPU, memory, hard disk, (I/O) interface, and a network. This collected data is then verified by the policy evaluator to see if resource contention is, or is close to, occurring. If so, existing or potential conflicts are dealt with by the enforcement module, which applies corrections, such as, for example, limiting the access of later chronologic users, or degrading the user experience of all users, in accordance with a desired policy in order to vitiate the resource contention and maintain a user experience consistent with the desired policy.