On 17/12/2008, at 9:09 AM, Blair Harrison wrote:
Seems to me like there is a lack of user demand for this kind of stuff. There's certainly no lack of content on the tubes today, so that's not the problem.
Multicast seems to work pretty good for re-imaging 1000 machines at a time or whatever, and I hear certain broadcasters use it to distribute the content around their network where it needs to go everywhere simultaneously, but as far as general user usage, I doubt it's going to happen any time soon.
If you can't point and click on a link in your browser and make it work, it's not going to be any use to anyone. If it was going to work, it would have worked by now. Please go back to your regularly scheduled anycast and akamai enabled tubes. :)
I imagine you probably can with WMP - its little stream description asx thing allows for fall back streams etc. So, put multicast first, and fall back to unicast. Not sure what fall back time would be like - would be If we're talking about broadcast style media, I don't see there really ever being any end user demand for it. This is a network/content provider optimisation - it doesn't give end users anything new. If a content provider can drop a multicast stream on to APE/WIX and have it fall back to unicast then that seems like a good thing, I would say. -- Nathan Ward