Multicast Traffic on Backbones

Mon Jun 11 07:09:47 UTC 2001

At 21:46 10/06/01 +0100, BrandonButterworth wrote:

> > HOWEVER, most of the 24x7 media sites (CNN, etc.) are doing on-demand
> > video, rather than streaming a constant feed.

Just wait a year or two.  There are now two companies that I know of 
(probably others) that do near-on-demand video via multicast:

http://www.bandwiz.com/
http://www.digitalfountain.com/

By doing clever encoding techniques these companies are able to provide 
near on demand video streams via a *single* multicast stream.  See:
http://www.digitalfountain.com/technology/DF_techOverview.pdf - simple overview
http://www.digitalfountain.com/technology/DFTechWhitePaper2.9.pdf - 
detailed geek overview

-Hank

>1) rights
>
>2) unicast doesn't scale to the sort of audiences of radio/tv
>    broadcasts and if you try it becomes financially unviable too
>    (even with people attempting to fake multicast, e.g. Akamai)
>
>One way to manage both is to use the VCR model
>
> > On the one
> > hand, content providers aren't offering 24x7 multicast feeds because there
> > isn't enough multicast access at the end-points.
>
>We offer it regardless but there's not many can use it
>
> > Apart from 24x7 broadcast there isn't an obvious killer app.
>
>And there's reasonable argument over making the intenet = tv
>
>brandon