How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?

Sat Apr 30 00:01:37 UTC 2011

Daniel,

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Daniel Roesen <dr at cluenet.de> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 05:51:25PM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>> > 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.
>
> That reminds me of 9/11. When the tragic event unfolded, we sat in the
> office. News made the rounds verbally, and people started looking for
> streaming services at their personal desks (no TVs around). People
> pretty quickly gave up trying to find streams and news portals which were
> actually working fine and the crowd gathering behind me watching over my
> shoulder became bigger and bigger.
>
> Why? Because I was in the fortunate position of being able to watch an
> Mbone multicast stream of some news TV broadcaster... cannot remember
> wether it was CNN or BBC or someone else entirely. Back then, a collegue
> was playing around with IP multicast and my desktop machine had connectivity
> to his Mbone-connected playground. :)
>
> IP multicast was the only way for us to see what happened, live.
> Unicast failed miserably.

+10

I've been meaning to write something similar. Multicast infrastructure
in place absolutely and certainly has a role to play in
"humanity-wide" events.
Also, having a 'free' distribution channel for those moving images
carrying such licensing that it does not matter how many eyeballs see
them, could be valuable as well.

I made sure to get this capability in the network I worked on last.

Cheers,
Martin