[140134] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay Ashworth)
Tue May 3 00:44:27 2011
Date: Tue, 3 May 2011 00:42:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>
To: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <5A6D953473350C4B9995546AFE9939EE0C9E305B@RWC-EX1.corp.seven.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
----- Original Message -----
> From: "George Bonser" <gbonser@seven.com>
> It doesn't make sense for a lot of on-demand access but makes a lot of
> sense for live content like radio talk shows, news, sports, etc. Even
> webcams could be upgraded to provide streaming content rather than
> individual frames without chewing up a lot of resources. It wouldn't
> matter if 1 or 1 million people are watching, the bandwidth resource
> requirement would remain the same.
>
> If there are 10,000 Comcast subscribers watching exactly the same live
> event on the net, sending 10,000 streams of exactly the same data is
> dumb and it doesn't have to be that way.
And, more to the point, as we proceed more and more into a live-tweet,
social TV world, *having all your viewers within a second or two of
each other* becomes more and more important.
My experience is that that's *much* easier to manage in a multicast
environment, than with live-unicast streaming -- especially when there
are multiple server clusters in different places for load balancing.
Cheers,
-- jra
