Real Media and M-Bone feeds

Tue Oct 5 13:31:00 UTC 1999

> > just forget about it and spend our life doing something
> > useful instead?
> 
> because, although it is getting less expensive quickly, transport costs
> money.  multicast promises to reduce that cost near sources.
Wrong...

Multicast is just not more than one case of data caching on the fly. It
can be used for the local networks, just with the net of the media
replicators. In principle there is not big difference between multicast
and www caching except first is an example of the _real-time caching_ and
second is usially _store-and-forward_ caching.

This days we can see the weakness of the global-multicasting - and I think
it should be replaced by the media-caching servers (with the ability to
replicate data on the fly - in case of live media stream, and short or
long tome _store-and-forward_ in case of Video-on-demand stream) - and
with just this multicasting on the very end of the data tree. But an
attempts to build over-the-world multicast network - brr... it's possible
(if you should dig some mountain every day, you'll build a tunnel at last;
but may be it's easy to run this mountain over?).

And - your NANOG forum is the excellent example. RealVideo streaming work
fine; Multicast don't work at all; why do you try to use weak schema
instead of the strong one? No enougph bandwidth - install stream
replicators inb the key points; build _replication on the fly_ schemas
(such as CCP for the www caching on the fly), etc. No, even with all
attempts Cisco and some other are trying this days - multicast is more
dead than alive. I can get 10,000 multimedia sources by RealVideo or
StreamVideo - and I can't get nothing usefull by multicast. If I could
install RV-cache engine (cache on the fly) - I should choose this
solution.

> 
> this is a better fantasy than the qos smokers who think it will effectively
> get more bits into the pipe.
> 
> randy
> 
> 

Aleksei Roudnev, Network Operations Center, Relcom, Moscow
(+7 095) 194-19-95 (Network Operations Center Hot Line),(+7 095) 230-41-41, N 13729 (pager)
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