How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?

Mon May 2 18:53:35 UTC 2011

On Apr 29, 2011, at 8:46 PM, Jared Mauch wrote:

> 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.

I'm not at all certain that this is a political problem.  I believe it is more of a user need / want problem (which I guess you could classify as "layer > 7" if you want).

The occasional large live "event" - and when I say occasional, I mean not a few per year - likely could be helped if there were a magic wand to wave which made multicast work for no CapEx or OpEx and perfectly billed.  But the vast majority of traffic cannot be served by multi-cast.

The real cost of multi-cast (when it works at all!) may be too great for the small benefit, even ignoring the billing mechanism.

People's proclivities change.  As a vendor / supplier / company who gets paid, we have to adjust to the wishes of the people paying us as best we can.  Or someone else will.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick