RE: Broadcast television in an IP world

Does multicast have any future?

Nope. We have a couple of gigs of multicast traffic on our network. Its pretty easy. You can't pay me enough to troubleshoot multicast between different ISP's. Multicast network look different from the Internet. One would have to change. On top of that any packet loss is a show stopper. It has no facility for retransmission. Multicast is good because its not much load on the routers. Even thinking about pushing it over WiFi makes me jump right to a server with a TCP stack or similar. So those NetFlix servers seem about as good a long term strategy as any. Save the loud fans. Video is just another application.