All things related to multicast

[Leonard Giuliano <>]

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:

-) Jon Crowcroft wrote:
-)
-) > since practically no access ISPs allow multicast, how do they know it
-) > reduces revenue?
-) >
-) > this is a typical armchair economist argument
-)
-) But I suspect it's the major obstacle in its deployment.
-)

Not really.  It's usually the first thing that (uninformed) ISP product
managers come up with, but on the list of reasons why mcast isn't deployed
everywhere, the unicast-revenue-cannibalizing argument is fairly far down
on the list.

This argument would make more sense if there actually was unicast traffic
that mcast could cannibalize.  We are talking mainly about video here, and
for all practical purposes, there really is no video of any kind of
critical mass on the Internet today.  The reason is simple- there's no
business plan that could support unicast video.  Anyone who tried to do it
is now out of business or just gave up after realizing that you are just
throwing money away if you want to do video over unicast.

As Jon pointed out, the reality is that mcast traffic would be NEW content
that is not currently possible/viable with unicast, rather than traffic
that's available via unicast but transported more efficiently than
unicast.  New traffic on the network means hopefully new revenue, so your
unicast content and revenue stays constant, while mcast simply augments
it.


-Lenny