A scheme for managing bandwidth in a multi-client environment including one or more ABR clients and, optionally, one or more non-ABR clients. When an ABR client enters a sleep phase of its duty cycle, phantom tokens may be issued to simulate full capacity of the network link, wherein phantom packets are used for ABR bandwidth calculation. Any extra bandwidth that would have been used by another ABR client to artificially inflate its video quality may be optionally allocated to a non-ABR client engaged in a progressive download session in the same bandwidth pipe.