The scale of streaming video on the Internet.

Thu Dec 2 21:31:21 UTC 2010

On 12/2/2010 3:23 PM, david raistrick wrote:
> Have you ever actually been involved with really large scale multicast
> implementations? I take it that's a no.
>

Nope. I prefer small scale. :)

> The -only- way that would work internet wide, and it defeats the
> purpose, is if your client side created a tunnel back to your multicast
> source network. Which would mean you're carrying your multicast data
> over anycast.
>

So we don't use multicast, fallback to unicast deployments on the 
Internet today for various events/streams?

> If you, the multicast broadcaster, dont have extensive control of the
> -entire- end to end IP network, it will be significantly broken
> significant amounts of the time.

Clients can't fallback to unicast when multicast isn't functional? I'd 
expect multicast to save some bandwidth, not all of it.

>
> ...david (former member of a team of engineers who built and maintained
> a 220,000 seat multicast video network)

Cool. I did a 3 seat multicast video network, and honestly am largely 
ignorant of multicast over the Internet (on my list!) but do listen to 
people discuss it. :P

Jack