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Re: Multicast Traffic on Backbones

  • From: Hank Nussbacher
  • Date: Mon Jun 11 02:13:41 2001 
At 21:46 10/06/01 +0100, BrandonButterworth wrote:


> HOWEVER, most of the 24x7 media sites (CNN, etc.) are doing on-demand
> video, rather than streaming a constant feed.
Just wait a year or two. There are now two companies that I know of (probably others) that do near-on-demand video via multicast:

http://www.bandwiz.com/
http://www.digitalfountain.com/

By doing clever encoding techniques these companies are able to provide near on demand video streams via a *single* multicast stream. See:
http://www.digitalfountain.com/technology/DF_techOverview.pdf - simple overview
http://www.digitalfountain.com/technology/DFTechWhitePaper2.9.pdf - detailed geek overview

-Hank


1) rights

2) unicast doesn't scale to the sort of audiences of radio/tv
   broadcasts and if you try it becomes financially unviable too
   (even with people attempting to fake multicast, e.g. Akamai)

One way to manage both is to use the VCR model

> On the one
> hand, content providers aren't offering 24x7 multicast feeds because there
> isn't enough multicast access at the end-points.

We offer it regardless but there's not many can use it

> Apart from 24x7 broadcast there isn't an obvious killer app.

And there's reasonable argument over making the intenet = tv

brandon