All things related to multicast

[(John Watters)]

I'll bet that if we had CNN, the Weather Channel, and one or two other
TV channels with live feeds available I could get a lot of people
interested on my campus real quick. And, since I control the whole
campus infrastructure, I can get it pushed out to them -- no hassles
with departmental NetAdmins, etc. I already have multicast available to
about 75% of the campus (the part that has been rebuilt in the past 3
years; the rest is in process & should be finished in 2 more years).
There is just no demand because there is nothing being multicast that
anyone cares about.

Trying to guess what the next big app will be is fine, and should
certainly be considered. But, what we need now is to get an app out
there that people want now. I suggest that live TV (if it something
good; CSPAN doesn't count) could be that app. You would think that a
commercial TV network would see the benefit in allowing their feeds to
be sent out via multicast without any fee. The advertisers would reach
more people meaning that the networks could then charge them more for
their advertising minutes. And, the network would get enormous PR as
well as a large increase in viewers. Only if we can get several of the
big players interested would we have enough content to have a real
impact.

Another idea is to try to get the major movie distribution companies to
run loops of the movie previews of current releases -- the same 4-5
minute samples that you see when you go to the theater. There are always
a fair number of new movies on the street. So, you might be able to get
30-60 minutes of programming that could be replayed in an endless loop.
But, it would have to be changed every several days to reflect new
releases. If the stuff was out of date, it would be useless. It's free
advertising for their movies. And it would have some interest to users
(though not nearly as much as live TV would have).

Can anyone suggest how to go about getting something like this moving?





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John Watters  UA: Office of Information Technology  205-348-3992