The scale of streaming video on the Internet.

Thu Dec 2 23:15:57 UTC 2010

On Dec 2, 2010, at 2:01 PM, david raistrick wrote:

> On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, Antonio Querubin wrote:
> 
>>> -entire- end to end IP network, it will be significantly broken significant amounts of the time.
>> 
>> Which points to the need for service providers to deploy robust multicast routing.
> 
> No doubt - it also points to multicast itself needing a bit more sanity and flexibility for implimentation.   When you have to tune -every- l3 device along the path for each stream, well....
> 
It's not quite that bad. I've done multiple multicast implementations where this was utterly unnecessary, but, it does take
some configuration on most L3 devices to make it work reasonably well.

> 
> As Owen pointed out, perhaps carriers will eventually be motivated to make this happen in order to reduce their own bandwidth costs.  Eventually.
> 
> In the meantime, speaking with my content hat on, we stick with unicast. :)
> 
Wrong answer, IMHO. Where it makes sense, use multicast with a fast fallback to unicast if multicast isn't working.
In this way, it helps build the case that deploying multicast will save $$$. Without it, the mantra will be "Multicast
doesn't matter, even if we implement it, none of the content will use it."

Owen