Methods, apparatuses, and systems are provided for improving utilization of a communications system (e.g., a satellite communications system) when handling overlapping content requests. Embodiments use various techniques (e.g., dictionary coding techniques) to create fingerprints of content traversing the links of the communications system. These fingerprints are used to identify and exploit opportunities for using multicasting to share forward-link capacity by collapsing multiple overlapping requests for the same content via multiple content session streams into fewer session streams, including one or more shared session streams.