Re: How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?

["Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick () ianai net>]

On Apr 29, 2011, at 8:46 PM, Jared Mauch wrote:

> I think this is sadly the truth.  There are some problems that can be solved by multicast, but I've seen the number 
> of customer requests for v4 multicast go by the wayside over the years.  The only people that are generally 
> interested are the conference venues for technical things, e.g.: RIPE, ARIN/NANOG, APRICOT, etc.  
>
> Plus, conferences like NANOG have beamed the video back to some other site for fanout as well, for both unicast and 
> multicast.
>
> The problems at Layer7 and below are solvable with market forces.  They're all 8/9 issues, about the content 
> providers wanting to be paid-per-subscriber/viewer.  They don't want to know how few people are actually tuned in at 
> that moment in some cases.  I'm sure they want to be paid some fraction of that cost that goes to your TV Transport 
> conduit provider.

I'm not at all certain that this is a political problem.  I believe it is more of a user need / want problem (which I 
guess you could classify as "layer > 7" if you want).

The occasional large live "event" - and when I say occasional, I mean not a few per year - likely could be helped if 
there were a magic wand to wave which made multicast work for no CapEx or OpEx and perfectly billed.  But the vast 
majority of traffic cannot be served by multi-cast.

The real cost of multi-cast (when it works at all!) may be too great for the small benefit, even ignoring the billing 
mechanism.

People's proclivities change.  As a vendor / supplier / company who gets paid, we have to adjust to the wishes of the 
people paying us as best we can.  Or someone else will.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick