On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 06:56:19PM +1300, Nathan Ward said:
What applications are available for multicast? Can Flash do multicast? I think Quicktime and Windows media can, yeah?
I don't know about Quicktime (I suspect it can), or Flash (I suspect it can't) but to multicast off a Windows media server you move from Windows Server 2008 Standard to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Datacentre, with the attendant increase in cost. So for many smaller deployments, you'd be balancing transit cost versus server cost, and the transit cost may be lower. I think there's also a perception that multicast is a solution to a diminishing problem. Most of the major broadcasters seem to be acknowledging that the end of appointment TV (and radio) is nigh [1]. If live content is ~40% of your volume and dropping, and you still need some kind of non-multicast infrastructure to deal with the on demand (individually time shifted) content you're dishing up, then why bother with the effort of setting up multiple platforms? Cheers Si [1] I first heard this excellent phrase from the redoubtable Mr Macewen, I dunno if he spawned it or pilfered, but credit where credit is due, etc.
Maybe lack of skill is a problem as well. You could run a hands-on multicast workshop at NZNOG'10, perhaps. Set up a few sources and sinks, and build a multicast capable network in between :-)
I'd be kinda keen to do a bit of experimenting with radio streams in some spare time, but I don't have my own APE/WIX port right now. Do you have a link on to APE/WIX with Multicast enabled in some fashion? What about internationally? Can we build a tunnel of some kind? Feel free to offlist the response to that if you want, best not have any operational content on here :-)
-- Nathan Ward
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