All things related to multicast

[Alan Crosswell <>]

> My biggest question is, "What is impeding multicast on college/
> university/research park campuses?"  Most of the objections to
> doing high-BW multicast don't apply there, but, success has still
> been limited.  Perhaps even grad students are too busy producing
> PowerPoint slides to watch IETF and NANOG broadcasts.

People don't want to sit through hours of droning IETF and NANOG broadcasts in 
real time, in the time zone of the event.  They want on-demand so they can 
fast-forward over the junk and get to what is interesting for them.  Smart mcast 
on-demand apps might some day make their appearance -- if there are a large 
enough number of on-demand viewers of the same stream, statisically some number 
of them may be distributed closely enough together to give them all a multicast 
stream.  Windows Update would be a great multicast app!  So would bit torrent.

For broadcast-TV style stuff people (at least old people like us) will sit 
through live shows, but less and less so as everyone starts using PVRs to skip 
commercials (or skip football and watch commercials for the super bowl).  As 
mentioned in another posting, a few schools are using multicast to provide 
"cable TV" to dorms that were not wired for traditional cable.

I think cable operators are clued-in to multicast but even if and when they 
deploy it (some probably already do;  one told me they weren't running a recent 
enough DOCSIS release to do so yet) they'll likely restrict it to their own domain.

One way we religious zealots can make multicast happen to some extent is by 
specifiying it as a requirement of our ISP service offerings even though there's 
no compelling reason to do so (I guess that's the zealot part).  The fact that 
WMT and Real both support multicast with unicast failover is a good thing.  The 
reality is that Real by default does not use it.  I run a helix server and I've 
just begun RTFM on how to use multicast and, among other things, I will have to 
educate my users to give out a different URL than they are used to (an SDP file 
instead of a .ram).

If I get a chance after the netcast (mcast MPEG1 and real) I am currently 
babysitting (http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_now/symposia/brain_and_mind.html) I 
will try to set up Real scalable mcast for our commencement netcast next 
Wednesday -- mostly because I hate when people on my multicast campus network 
use up my 300 real server licenses because they are more comfortable using 
realplayer than trying to get IPTV or Quicktime to work with an MPEG1 mcast.  Of 
course, they could open their window and watch/listen too.

The current mcast apps used at CU are Ghost for updating PC labs, MPEG1 with a 
vbrick for "overflow" rooms for large events (some people have figured out the 
overflow room can be in their office), and all that Apple rendezvous noise which 
seems to provide nothing of use.  Oh, and we have 2 NASA TV viewers:-)  In fact, 
NASA TV is what got one of our remote campuses to become multicast-enabled.
/a