Re: Multicast Traffic on Backbones

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

Folks have given a number of interesting multimedia applications using
multicast, but I'm not sure any of them really need multicast.

Akamia/iBeam/Skycache, or any other set of large memory buffer boxes around
the network edge, seem to be a much better way to replicate multimedia
streams, and even provide the popular VCR start/pause/stop effect. This
works well for single sourced (or limited source) multimedia streams that
have very little interaction with the recipient (aka TV for the Internet).

Multicast seems to be more efficient for updating large buffer edge boxes
than delivering the content directly to the end-user.