How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?

Fri Apr 29 22:15:42 UTC 2011

> 
> > Imagine: multicast internet radio! Awesome!
> 
> That would, indeed, be awesome; when everyone in my office was
> listening to
> the royal wedding, there would be a *much* higher chance of them all
> being
> in sync.
> 
> Cheers,
> -- jra

Exactly.  If more people/networks took advantage of multicast, it would greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements, particularly for live events.  If there were 50 people listening to a popular radio show or watching a live TV event in your office, for example, there would be only one feed crossing the wire into your office.  And only one feed crossing into your provider's network.

I have *no* idea why applications developers have not been more interested in this, particularly with radio and television stations providing live streams on the net.  It is absolutely a waste of resources to have a separate stream for each listener of a live event.

The mobile networks are more up to speed in this regard.  Verizon Vcast is probably the largest implementation that I know of.