How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?

Sat Apr 30 00:46:22 UTC 2011

On Apr 29, 2011, at 4:40 PM, Tim Durack wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 3:11 PM, Joel Jaeggli <joelja at bogus.com> wrote:
>> On 4/29/11 10:12 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>> 
>> It turns out that as a content provider you can unicast video delivery
>> without coordinating the admission of your content onto every edge
>> eyeball network on the planet. It's cheap enough that it makes money on
>> fairly straght-forward internet business models and it apparently scales
>> to meet the needs of justin beiber fans.
>> 
>> 
> 
> Imagine: multicast internet radio! Awesome!
> 
> I have a feeling streaming is going to stay unicast.
> 
> Multicast is a great technical solution in search of a good business problem.

I think this is sadly the truth.  There are some problems that can be solved by multicast, but I've seen the number of customer requests for v4 multicast go by the wayside over the years.  The only people that are generally interested are the conference venues for technical things, e.g.: RIPE, ARIN/NANOG, APRICOT, etc.  

Plus, conferences like NANOG have beamed the video back to some other site for fanout as well, for both unicast and multicast.

The problems at Layer7 and below are solvable with market forces.  They're all 8/9 issues, about the content providers wanting to be paid-per-subscriber/viewer.  They don't want to know how few people are actually tuned in at that moment in some cases.  I'm sure they want to be paid some fraction of that cost that goes to your TV Transport conduit provider.

- Jared

(who buys and downloads shows, and pays nothing for others as they come OTA "free")