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> That said, multicast works just fine over the Internet. It's not commonly used, certainly not by home users and not very often by enterprise users, and was ph

by toast0 1y ago

> That said, multicast works just fine over the Internet. It's not commonly used, certainly not by home users and not very often by enterprise users, and was phased out on Internet2 by 2021 (I think?), but there's absolutely nothing in principle that would make it not work. In principle, no. In practice, I don't think many ISPs have equipment configured to forward multicast, except for those using multicast for TV and those probably don't interconnect with others.

ta1243 1y ago
Many years ago UK ISPs particpated in an MBone with BBC, ITV etc providing live broadcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/tv/channels.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/tv/channels.shtml Brandon Butterworths note about "why" https://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/why.html https://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/why.html Shows the growth of the backbone and CDNs: > The Olympic audience is expected to be around 50K streams, delivering 10Gbit+ is on the limit of sensible unicast delivery. In 2020 the BBC's internal CDN was delivering 100 times that [0] for 250k users, and 5 years later I suspect it's another order of magnitude given that iplayer does 5 million concurrent live views quite frequently [1,2] [0] https://medium.com/bbc-product-technology/bbc-online-2020-in-review-e47dada5df3f https://medium.com/bbc-product-technology/bbc-online-2020-in... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2024/audiences-flock-to-bbc-for-major-sport-finals-euros-wimbledon https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2024/audiences-flock-to-bb... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2022/england-v-iran-bbc-live-streaming-record?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2022/england-v-iran-bbc-li... By 2035 and TV turnoff there's no reason to believe that the infrastructure won't have been able to scale another 100 fold and handle 500 million concurrent live streams. Makes no sense to multicast out 30 different formats, to people on phones and tablets and TVs hanging off wifi. It's a very different consumer experience than a PC wired into an ISP like it was in 2007.
Bluecobra 1y ago
You can definitely route multicast over the Internet via some kind of tunnel, be it stunnel, VPN, GRE. The ICE exchange uses stunnel for dev/certification multicast.

by toast0 1y ago

ta1243 1y ago

Many years ago UK ISPs particpated in an MBone with BBC, ITV etc providing live broadcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/tv/channels.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/tv/channels.shtml Brandon Butterworths note about "why" https://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/why.html https://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/why.html Shows the growth of the backbone and CDNs: > The Olympic audience is expected to be around 50K streams, delivering 10Gbit+ is on the limit of sensible unicast delivery. In 2020 the BBC's internal CDN was delivering 100 times that [0] for 250k users, and 5 years later I suspect it's another order of magnitude given that iplayer does 5 million concurrent live views quite frequently [1,2] [0] https://medium.com/bbc-product-technology/bbc-online-2020-in-review-e47dada5df3f https://medium.com/bbc-product-technology/bbc-online-2020-in... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2024/audiences-flock-to-bbc-for-major-sport-finals-euros-wimbledon https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2024/audiences-flock-to-bb... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2022/england-v-iran-bbc-live-streaming-record?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2022/england-v-iran-bbc-li... By 2035 and TV turnoff there's no reason to believe that the infrastructure won't have been able to scale another 100 fold and handle 500 million concurrent live streams. Makes no sense to multicast out 30 different formats, to people on phones and tablets and TVs hanging off wifi. It's a very different consumer experience than a PC wired into an ISP like it was in 2007.

Bluecobra 1y ago

You can definitely route multicast over the Internet via some kind of tunnel, be it stunnel, VPN, GRE. The ICE exchange uses stunnel for dev/certification multicast.