How do you put a TV station on the Mbone? (was: Royal Wedding...)

Fri Apr 29 18:51:30 UTC 2011

On Fri Apr 29, 2011 at 01:48:51PM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> Will they not complain about having their equipment utilization go up
> with no recompense -- for something that is only of benefit to commercial
> customers of some other entity?

Sorry, but are your eyeballs not already paying you for that bandwidth that
they are consuming. Multicast merely optimises that across your network.

You have 200,000 eyeballs all watching the royal wedding on youtube, at 2Mbps
per stream.

or

You have 200,000 eyeballs all watching the royal wedding on multicast, with
no more than one copy of 2Mbps going over each of your backbone links.

I know which one I'd prefer.

The only place it causes some confusion over charging is if you're the content
ISP which is originating the multicast. How do you charge your TV Channel
customer? Sure, it won't be 2Mbps at your normal per Mbps rate, but equally it
won't be 2Mbps * the number of end users watching the stream. It'll be 
somewhere in the middle, probably tending far more towards the 2Mbps end.

Simon