A method of protecting data with application layer forward error correction in a communication system, wherein the communication system includes first devices with legacy receivers and second devices with FEC-enabled receivers, operation of the legacy receivers is not affected by the application layer forward error correction, and the method includes: determining a duration period; assembling packets of source data into source blocks corresponding to the duration period, each source block comprising a number of packets of source data; encoding the source blocks to generate encoded blocks, each encoded block comprising a number of packets of repair data; and transmitting the packets of repair data.