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> It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time. That's a nice use ca
by No1 11y ago
> It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.
That's a nice use case for multicast.
Worked for me over a decade ago.
I can only assume the technology has gotten better since.
- smt88 11y agoThe number of people and expected video quality have also increased
- sre_ops 11y agoAlso not a problem. It is an chunk transmitted over HTTP. 6th chuck of a video stream of the same content is exactly the same for everyone per bitrate.
- chipotle_coyote 11y agoI think that use case was implied by the OP: With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. Multicast is effectively broadcast -- it's (theoretically) great if what you're distributing is a live video stream. But we're moving toward a world where the vast majority of what we're watching is on-demand. While I could be wrong about this, my strong suspicion is that the technology hasn't gotten better in the last decade; most implementations just don't scale to the level that a service like ESPN would require (i.e., millions of nodes reliably receiving HD video), and I'm not even sure most commercial Internet backbones support multicast.
- JimboOmega 11y agoDoes multicast see any actual use? I was under the impression that while it's theoretically great for a live video stream, nobody ever actually uses it.
- jon-wood 11y agoThe last time I checked a few UK TV channels were doing multicast streaming, but none of the big ISPs actually supported it. I have no idea what's involved in making it work but I find it really sad that it's not used more.
- jon-wood 11y agoOut of curiosity I dug into this a bit more. The BBC's multicast trial (which has been a trial for at least ten years now) is still running, but I assume at this point isn't going anywhere. However BT (one of the big ISPs) uses multicast to deliver their TV service, so I assume BT their connections are capable of receiving multicasts if properly configured.
- lmm 11y agoUnfortunately more and more people seem to think connecting through NAT is acceptable.