----- Original Message ----- > From: "George Bonser" <[email protected]>
> It doesn't make sense for a lot of on-demand access but makes a lot of > sense for live content like radio talk shows, news, sports, etc. Even > webcams could be upgraded to provide streaming content rather than > individual frames without chewing up a lot of resources. It wouldn't > matter if 1 or 1 million people are watching, the bandwidth resource > requirement would remain the same. > > If there are 10,000 Comcast subscribers watching exactly the same live > event on the net, sending 10,000 streams of exactly the same data is > dumb and it doesn't have to be that way. And, more to the point, as we proceed more and more into a live-tweet, social TV world, *having all your viewers within a second or two of each other* becomes more and more important. My experience is that that's *much* easier to manage in a multicast environment, than with live-unicast streaming -- especially when there are multiple server clusters in different places for load balancing. Cheers, -- jra
