All things related to multicast

[Ted Hanss <>]

Thanks for all the suggestions on how to improve the multicast situation. I 
welcome the feedback and hope that we are making progress.

We distributed some, but not all, of the Virtual Member Meeting over 
multicast due the distributed nature of the "breakout sessions" during the 
days following the plenary day (which was fully multicast). The problems 
with Real had to do with a network problem located on the commodity path 
between the Real encoders and the Real servers that were used.

Since the virtual MM we have built a stable netcasting infrastructure and 
have been multicasting our meeting content (and that of others meetings 
we've covered) using IP/TV MPEG-1, Ncast MPEG-1, vic H.261, MPEG-2, and 
DVTS (the WIDE Project's 25 mbps DV stream).  We have sent presenter 
PowerPoint slides out over vic using Camtasia's screen recorder, which 
provides a very good quality image. The MPEG-2 client situation is going to 
improve --- stay tuned for some news on that.

This infrastructure is available for others to plug into. For example, 
during iGrid 2002, we took a PAL MPEG-2 unicast feed from Amsterdam, 
converted it to NTSC, and then redistributed it via several unicast and 
multicast formats for North America audiences.

We weren't even aware in advance that the Michigan governor's announcement 
was being netcast, otherwise we would have arranged to feed it through our 
netcast configuration.