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Video abstract for the article 'Long range failure-tolerant entanglement distribution' by Ying Li, Sean D Barrett, Thomas M Stace and Simon C Benjamin (Ying Li et al 2013 New J. Phys. 15 023012). Read the full article in New Journal of Physics http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/15/2/023012/article. GENERAL SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY Introduction and background. Distributing an entangled state among remote quantum computers is one of the fundamental tasks of quantum information technologies. It is crucial for quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography and distributed quantum computing. Using direct transmission, the success probability of transmitting a qubit and the fidelity of the resulting quantum state decrease exponentially with distance. Therefore, one needs quantum repeaters to achieve long distance entanglement. A good quantum repeater protocol should be fault-tolerant and support a high communication rate. Main results. In this paper, we propose a protocol of distributing entanglement by single-qubit measurements on a topologically protected cluster state across the chain of repeater stations. In our protocol, the repeater stations may employ non-deterministic entanglement operations: that is, a means of entanglement, even within a single repeater, that often fails but the failures are 'heralded'. The protocol is valid if the probability of an error occurring in the communication channel connecting stations is lower than a threshold, which is 15% when errors induced by operations within repeaters are negligible. And, we find that the rate of distributing entanglement decreases only logarithmically with the communication distance. Wider implications. Compared with previous protocols, ours is the first to consider a probabilistic architecture within each repeater station, so that the entanglement distribution can be efficient even if entanglement operations are far from deterministic, i.e. our protocol is less experimentally demanding.