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

Fri Apr 29 19:03:47 UTC 2011

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Simon Lockhart" <simon at slimey.org>

> 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.

He's the devil, I'm just his advocate. 

Good.  :-)

> 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.

Sure; people who supply lots of bandwidth to content providers *now* will 
probably be unhappy about this idea, but...  no business is guaranteed 
its business model; that observation goes back at *least* to Robert Heinlein's
first short story, "Lifeline" from 1954(?)... and I *think* he was quoting
Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand, but haven't been able to source it.

The real problem I see myself is that *the Mbone has to be pervasive* (or
mostly so) for this to be a worthwhile investment for providers.

Not to mention it being practical for eyeballs to *get* to it; haven't seen
that HOWTO pointer yet from anyone.  :-)