---- Original Message ----- > From: "david raistrick" <[email protected]>
> 1) As a consumer network (enterprise, home) - that case is VERY rare. > 50 people consuming it at your house? Or at the office consuming the same > feed? (even at a 10k employee company, the rate of that is fairly low, > particularly on the same leg of the network - I'd love to see some > statistics that prove me wrong). The amount of work that goes into > supporting and maintaining this is much higher than the return I'd get > from it. Even assuming the upstreams supported it. I'd expect it to be fairly common at colleges; possibly in companies, depending on the content being watched: live news events are the most common example -- igmp aware viewer clients (which would bias towaards this by showing the already running feeds) would also help. > 2) as a content provider, there's a lot of extra work involved towards > maintain this with my upstreams, and every mid-stream between me at the > consumer networks. I require specialists in multicast (comparatively speaking > unicast specialists are a dime a dozen) and I have to fight a lot of > politics with the upstreams, and I -still- have to support the unicast > models so the folks who can't consume multicast can see my content. Is it still this fragile in 2011? > 3) as an a midstream network provider I have almost no motivation to > support this. Sure, my network usage would be reduced - but I (more or > less simplified here, but) make my living on each bit of traffic I carry - > if I offered a way for providers and consumers to reduce their traffic, > that would reduce the amount they pay me. Win for them, lose for me. americafree.tv has a list, compiled (I think) by Marhsall Eubanks, that lists ISPs and backbones with a formal positive position on this. Be fun to put you two in a room together. :-) > the fact of the matter is that until multicast or it's like -doesn't- > require massive end-to-end support (and frequently configuration to > support each stream), there won't be heavy use of it. When I can turn > up a multicast stream as easily as I can turn up a unicast stream, > there is -still- a absolute lack of client-side software to recieve and > playback the streams, and very limited support for broadcasting the streams. Clearly, there's not an *absolute* lack, or people wouldn't be using it for anything anywhere ever, which they demonstrably are. I should think that given Flowplayer, there's a pretty good platform for implementing such a player in the environment in which program providers would want to use it... though I'm not intimately familiar with its code. > ...david (one time multicast specialist supporting a 200,000 seat 4 > channel multicast infrastructure, so I'm fully aware of what magic is > really involved in maintaining it across divergent networks that -WE- > owned (or could exercise control of). before that streaming 40Gb/s > (~200 channels of unicast video for general consumers + on demand streams) And you haven't written the O'Reilly book yet... why? :-) Thanks for the input, David. Cheers, -- jra
