All things related to multicast

["Marshall Eubanks" <>]

On Fri, 14 May 2004 16:02:57 -0400
 "Richard Mavrogeanes" 
<>
 wrote:
> We are quite knowledgeable about this topic. 
> Short version: they do pay for it.
> Longer version: it's expensive.
> Still longer version: we (multicast advocates) cannot claim sufficient 
> number of eyeballs to make
> it interesting to them. Sort of a catch-22.
> 
> rich
> 

Dear Rich;

I would actually disagree, at least in part. It assumes way too much
rationality on the part of the entertainment industry.

Here is my short take on the business side of things.
Multicasting was incredibly unlucky in its timing.
It could have been part of the basic Internet set of
protocols when the Internet took off, but it wasn't
quite ready yet. It could have benefited from the
rush of dot com money (and did, at some level), but that
money became value subtracting when people stopped caring about the
cost of bandwidth and wanted ears and eyes at any cost. So a
lot of money went to bandwidth and brought no return. 
Broadcast.com could have pushed it everywhere but then 
Yahoo bought them and stopped that. Who knows what the future will
bring, but the past was ill-starred.

As for audience, I have always found that my (very hard to measure)
multicast audience is comparible in size to or larger than my unicast
audience. But this doesn't matter much in actual experience. Here is
a much more realistic situation

- audience member(s) cannot get multicast while unicast is maxed out
- they ask how to do so
- realistically, there is little that they can do to do so
- audience member(s) complains loudly to client
- client is pissed off 
- client cancels contract

After a few rounds of this, I decided to stop pushing it and let it grow 
naturally.
Someone is generally watching the Three Stooges using multicast; what more 
can I ask ?

Multicasting is also hurt by not supporting store and forwarding of static 
contact.
One could argue that the most disruptive aspect of the entire Internet is 
Peer to Peer
technology, which can be viewed aa asynchronous application layer type of 
multicast store
and forward. 

Multicasting as a network tool will not go away. Multicasting as a way to 
make broadcasting
as ubiquitous as web pages on the Internet may not be necessary. Things are 
different on
wireless networks, however, and I think that a seamless combination
native and application (or unicast) based multicast could gain some serious 
traction. 

Regards
Marshall

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Gilbert 
> [mailto:]
> Sent: Friday, May 14, 2004 3:20 PM
> To: 'John Watters'; 'wg-multicast'
> Subject: RE: Why don't we use multicast more often?
> 
> 
> 
> There are some financials that do distribute CNN and other channels
> around their networks using multicast and as far as I know they do not
> pay for it.  How did they do it?, they asked permission and the TV
> companies allowed it.
> 
> 
> 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. 
> 
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> John Watters  UA: Office of Information Technology  205-348-3992
>