Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 18:43:44 -0400 From: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM> To: lyndon@orthanc.ab.ca Cc: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Dinosaur ? Unicast : Multicast ;-) Message-ID: <199909162243.SAA93367@whizzo.transsys.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 16 Sep 1999 16:27:38 MDT." <199909162227.QAA58562@orthanc.ab.ca> References: <199909162227.QAA58562@orthanc.ab.ca>
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> >>>>> "Louis" == Louis A Mamakos <louie@TransSys.COM> writes: > > Louis> They don't give a whiz about multicast or unicast; they > Louis> just want to click on the link and have noise come out of > Louis> the speaker. Ideally, they'd like to use the stuff already > Louis> on their PC, and that's Real or Media Player. > > Media Player hints that it can receive and play multicast streams. I > haven't tried it, but if it works it shouldn't be hard to cook up > a URL that launches it with the appropriate settings to receive the > feed. Yes, and the Real Player also has the same capability. But the important thing to note is that the end user doesn't know or care, and that the application will (usually) fall back to using unicast transport to deliver the content. > Louis> Commercially, content providers don't care about multicast > Louis> either, other than as an optimization to help reach some of > Louis> their audience more cost effectively. They are more > Louis> interested in getting eyeballs and ear, regardless of the > Louis> delivery mechanism. It's just exactly this point which is > Louis> the reason you don't see widespread commercial deployment > Louis> of "mbone" applications. > > That's *not* what the vendors presenting papers at the latest > ACM SIGCOMM[1] were saying. They've finally realized that there's no > hope at all of providing commercial services based on unicast > technology; there simply is not enough bandwidth out there. I > fully expect to see the big content providers to start offering > multicast based services by early next year. I have a certain bit of experience with commercial multicast services, and the problem isn't technology- it's a business/financial problem. How do you deploy a service/capability so that you can survive it's success? Yes, we technologist can all dismiss this unclean consideration, but if you can't afford to operate it, then you better not start. > [1] Which was shipped around the world via multicast, not Realvideo :-) Compared to the streaming media content that is commerically distributed every day, for example, by broadcast.com, this is literally in the noise. louie To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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