Real Media and M-Bone feeds

Tue Oct 5 19:43:13 UTC 1999

On Tue, Oct 05, 1999 at 11:22:51PM +0400, Alex P. Rudnev wrote:
> > > I strongly suspect that the combined time of engineering staff spent
> > > on deployment and development of mulitcasting won't be paid off by
> > > the supposed transport cost savings any time soon.
> > 
> > 	The problem is that everyone thinks that multicasting is
> > more complicated than it really is.  
> Jared, we (I and Vadim - it's amazing but we are far one from another but
> support the same ideas) don't think multicasting is complex; but to build
> stable, hacker's/free, well controlled multicast network is really the
> complex (and unsolved yet) task. 

	Yes, there are the hacker related issues that need to be
addressed.

	I'm not touching on that here directly...

> And when thuch network will be (if) built, it cover only 10 - 15% of the
> customers demand - only LIVE-MULTIMEDIA, while 90% of this demand is
> _on-demand multimedia_ (hope I did not twisted my idea by the wrong
> translation).

	[see further down on percentages]

> I here do not need multicasting now; I need to get a numerous multimedia
> sources I have now in Internet, and made this sources available widely by
> decreasyng the bandwidth they use in our uplinks.  We have 1 - 2 - 3 live
> events a week, and we have 10,000 - 100,000 on-demand sources - it's a
> difference. And (more important) it's a better way to solve boths problems
> at once than to follow _multicast_ idea blindly.

	Absoluteley.

> Multicast works well in the DENSE case - when you have a LAN network with
> the 10 - 20 listeners; it's useless in the RARE network when 100 customers
> listen everyone to his own stream. Moreover, multicast do nothining
> (almost) in comparation with existing air broadcasting, it's not more than
> one extra transport (and very complex transport - turn on your TV or your
> radio-tuner - and you can listen to the Russion radio stations even from
> the USA - now try the same by multicast); but ON-DEMAND streams provide
> new feature for the customers - you can't call TV station and ask _show me
> this animation_ - but RealVideo client can. 

	With the advent of DSL, etc.. and the more people
that are entering the broadband markets, I think that this will change.
The number of people that are sending live media all the time I believe
will change.  Currently numerous radio stations are sending
live audio via (some sort of) streaming media to the world, either via
the real products, or via the m$ products, or both.  

	As more and more people get higher bandwidth solutions into their
homes, (dsl, cable, etc), there are people out there that would like to
start sending their video along with audio.  Creating the
ability for there to be a less resource intensive one-to-many system
on the broadcaster will (in my mind) allow more people to get into the
sourcing these types of sources, for either pay, or whatnot.  (Think
USA cable, pay-per-view.. they make their money someplace).

	I'm not saying that the on-demand media is not important, but
I see more and more live events also being there.  The on-demand media
will be important, but you can distribute your on-demand servers
across multiple providers, but your live media needs to be more
transportable.

	- Jared

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.
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