At 01:48 p.m. 27/06/2003 +1200, David Robb wrote: <snip>

Overseas content proved to be largely boring, lossy, and not worth getting back when I played with it at ihug. Now this might have changed since then, but I suspect that locally generated content is still the way to go.

I used to be able to get a copyright clearance out of TVNZ for streaming provided I had a minder present. That stopped some years ago. So now I create my own content. Its still boring, but thats the subject matter. I get round the lossy issues with bandwidth and better codecs. Its a very niche business but I make money. More in the talk at Uniforum.

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Then you have to get it to the users,(The hard part). Customers would have to run Tunnels to the ISP (as Telecom Jetstream/Jetstart/Dialup) network

Running many tunnels defeats some of the purpose of multicast, since you're then back to multiple streams through the core of your network. Unless of course you can distribute the tunnel endpoints out to close to your customers, but then you may as well just use unicast and relay it.

Well the biggest part of the business is video on demand and that can really only be unicast as getting viewers to agree on what they watch is like agreeing on a TV Channel in a huge flat - hopeless. But I have gone back to streaming live and did the LOTR premiere last year with 10,000 clients. Its a lot of fun and didn't really stress much other than a few ISPs. The streaming business generally just uses unicast as getting network wide multicast is impossible. HOWEVER, Access Grids require multicast and will be running shortly (Cpus arrive monday). But I will tunnel the multicast to try and have a quiet life. Tunnels are the easy way out. The Mbone tools haven't kept up with codec development and aren't great quality. On the other hand divx/mp4 gives dvd quality at 800kbps which isn't hard to deliver. I've even got 300kbyte files going onto cell phones with very good feedback. Codecs certainly have got better. So my input is that the market (ie the viewers) want VOD and that doesn't need multicast. rich