multicast (was Re: Readiness for IPV6)

Tue Jul 9 17:44:06 UTC 2002

On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 11:49:11AM -0500, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
> Even worse, multicast is truly only suitable for live applications; 
> on-demand content can't be realistically mcasted, and users will not 
> settle for "the movie starts every 15 minutes" 

Just for the sake of argument I'll point out that this is exactly
how DirecTV offers PPV movies... each of the 30-odd movies available
for viewing in a given month are listed on one or more channels
with defined start times.  Obviously this may not translate to
on-demand movie streaming over the internet, but since DirecTV
seems to be at least a little bit successful with this approach
you may not want to be so quick to rule it out.

Whether people will pay money to watch movies streamed over the 
Internet (as opposed to traditional media such as cable or satellite)
is an entirely different question, of course.

--Jeff