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

Sat Apr 30 00:42:49 UTC 2011

On Apr 29, 2011, at 3:44 PM, John Levine wrote:

>> Delivering multicast to end users is fundamentally not hard. The
>> biggest issue seems to be with residential CPE (pretty much the same
>> problem as IPv6, really).
> 
> Well, more than that, since I don't really want my DSL pipe saturated
> with TV that I'm not watching, you need some way for the CPE to tell
> the ISP "send me stream N"

There are CPEs that do this, but some don't do it on a public IP network.

Additionally, considering the state of the home CPE market and how horrible it is, I doubt it will get better anytime soon.  You have to look no further than the copious numbers of "IPv6 Ready" devices on the shelves in stores today.  Oh, and the fact that the NAT on the v4 side breaks multicast.

> I suppose with some sort of spanning three thing it'd even be posssible
> to do that at multuple levels, so the streams are only fed to people
> who have clients for it.

This is what IGMP+PIM already do, sometimes with layer-2 support from switches, sometimes not, all depends on your topology.

- Jared