All things related to multicast

["Richard Mavrogeanes" <>]

Marshall,
 
I think you made the best point in a thread about three years ago when you 
waxed poetic 
about the ecomonic incentive that ISP's don't have. I think we mostly agree.
 
My point is merely that demand drives all things. There is a fantastic
opportunity for content providers to reach the eyes of the most sought-after 
demographic:
18-30 year old people who would rarely watch TV during 9-5. But they are not 
interested when we can claim 
a limited audience. But the audience can only grow when the content is there. 
Who could really afford to provide 
a million unicast live steams at reasonable bandwidths?  Folks like CNN only 
become
interested in working with us if we can talk in the millions of viewers which 
has the potental of
altering their advertising demographics for the better, but adding a few 
thousand is not interesting 
enough to take risk (risk="We are making money now, so it is better to 
prevent change than to accomidate it").
 
An "ISP", whether a local LAN administrator or a classic service provider, is 
likely to seek 
out a bandwidth efficient solution when they discover their users are sucking 
unicast bandwidth 
all viewing the same live feed, and might conclude they should support and 
promote multicasting.
I think this is likely to happen only when there is compelling content or a 
national emergency
as was the case with the Internet2 multicast CNN feed on 9/11.
 
You have do a service (and  I constantly attempt the same) to provided 
content to 
grow an auidence and grow the demand.  I think that the conent will come when
there is a means to deliver it of sufficient size (multicast), and the means 
to deliver it
will come (multicast) when there is compelling content not otherwise 
reasonably
available.
 
 
rich
 
 
 
 

        -----Original Message----- 
        From: Marshall Eubanks 
[mailto:]
 
        Sent: Fri 5/14/2004 4:52 PM 
        To: Richard Mavrogeanes; 
;
 John Watters; wg-multicast 
        Cc: 
        Subject: Re: Why don't we use multicast more often?
        
        

        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 
        >