death of the net predicted by deloitte -- film at 11

Mon Feb 12 03:32:11 UTC 2007

Thus spake "Daniel Senie" <dts at senie.com>
> At 02:57 PM 2/11/2007, Paul Vixie wrote:
>>...wouldn't there be, if interdomain multicast existed and had a 
>>billing
>>model that could lead to a compelling business model?  right now, to 
>>the
>>best of my knowledge, all large multicast flows are still intradomain.
>
> IP Multicast as a solution to video distribution is a non-starter. IP 
> Multicast for the wide area is a failure. It assumes large numbers of 
> people will watch the same content at the same time. The usage model 
> that could work for it most mimics the broadcast environment before 
> cable TV, when there were anywhere from three to ten channels to 
> choose from, and everyone watched one of those. That model has not 
> made sense in a long time. The proponents of IP Multicast seem to have 
> failed to notice this.

IPmc would be useful for sports, news, and other live events.  Think 
about how many people sit around their TVs staring at such things; it's 
probably a significant fraction of all TV-watching time.  Better yet, 
folks who want to watch particular sports games will be concentrated in 
the two cities that are playing (i.e. high fanout at the bottom of the 
tree), which multicast delivery excels at compared to unicast.

For non-live content, even if one assumes people want their next episode 
of "24" on demand, wouldn't it make more sense to multicast it to STBs 
that are set to record it (or that predict their owners will want to see 
it), vs. using P2P or direct download?  That'll save you gobs and gobs 
of bandwidth _immediately following the new program's release_.  After 
that majority of viewers get their copy, you can transition the program 
to another system (e.g. P2P) that is more amenable to on-demand 
downloading of "old" content.

Of course, this is a pointless discussion since residential multicast is 
virtually non-existent today, and there's no sign of it being imminent. 
Anyone want to take bets on whether IPmc or IPv6 shows up first?  ;-)

S

Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking 