How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?

[jra at baylink.com (Jay Ashworth)]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "George Bonser" <gbonser at seven.com>

> It doesn't make sense for a lot of on-demand access but makes a lot of
> sense for live content like radio talk shows, news, sports, etc. Even
> webcams could be upgraded to provide streaming content rather than
> individual frames without chewing up a lot of resources. It wouldn't
> matter if 1 or 1 million people are watching, the bandwidth resource
> requirement would remain the same.
> 
> If there are 10,000 Comcast subscribers watching exactly the same live
> event on the net, sending 10,000 streams of exactly the same data is
> dumb and it doesn't have to be that way.

And, more to the point, as we proceed more and more into a live-tweet,
social TV world, *having all your viewers within a second or two of 
each other* becomes more and more important.

My experience is that that's *much* easier to manage in a multicast 
environment, than with live-unicast streaming -- especially when there
are multiple server clusters in different places for load balancing.

Cheers,
-- jra