On Friday, Jun 27, 2003, at 00:17 Canada/Eastern, Richard Naylor wrote:
Instead, you're interested in Alastair Cook. Why should you wait til Monday at 8:45 every week and then miss it because you were on the phone.
You don't; you let the device attached to your satellite decoder know that Alastair Cook is cool, and the next time it occurs to you to to look you find that there's a small pile of relevant material sitting on the disk waiting for you to watch it. In my experience there's only a very tiny amount of content on TV that's ever worth watching live (and most of the live stuff is endless looped repetition of news you already saw hours before, although maybe that's just a North American phenomenon :) Applications like file distribution and cache synchronisation are much more compelling drivers of multicast. A $30 dish glued to the roof has always seemed to me like a more sensible way of distributing video than trying to shoe-horn it into IP networks.
Multicast is great for synchronous events like TRADITIONAL tv. I just don't see that continuing.
Broadcast is great for content delivery, and that's what satellites do (with a single last-mile network for millions of subscribers). The "on-demand" bit can be pushed to the edge. Joe