Subject: RE: How do you put a TV station on the Mbone? Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:15:42 -0700 From: George Bonser <gbonser@seven.com>
Imagine: multicast internet radio! Awesome!
That would, indeed, be awesome; when everyone in my office was listening to the royal wedding, there would be a *much* higher chance of them all being in sync.
Cheers, -- jra
Exactly. If more people/networks took advantage of multicast, it would greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements, particularly for live events. If there were 50 people listening to a popular radio show or watching a live TV event in your office, for example, there would be only one feed crossing the wire into your office. And only one feed crossing into your provider's network.
I have *no* idea why applications developers have not been more interested in this, particularly with radio and television stations providing live streams on the net. It is absolutely a waste of resources to have a separate stream for each listener of a live event.
There's a layer 9 (or is it 10? <wry grin> -- required for legal reasons) answer for that. Radio/television stations are required to pay 'performance' royalties to the 'authors' and 'performers' of the works they transmit over the internet. Those royalties are based on the _actual_number_ of persons tuning in to each such work. No 'averaging', no 'estimating', nothing based on 'ratings', or other 'sampling techniques -- you have to count the _actual_number_ of people tuned in. It gets messy, but you have to have 'auditable' records of when each person 'tuned in', and when they 'tuned out'. One _has_ to be able to detect the latter condition under all possible circumstances. This means you must use a 'loss of signal' methodology. You can't trust the tuned-in listener to _actually_ stop listening "just because" they said they would. The people getting the royalties will claim the tuned-in party lied, and they're due royalties even after they said they're tuning out. The people _paying_ the fees won't accept having to pay for people who 'tuned out' in 'non-standard' ways. Ways like a program (or O/S, for that matter) crash, 'backhoe fade, etc. One party worries about people -not- tuning out when they said they are. The other worries about people tuning out -without- saying they are. The only to keep both sides happy is to use a methodology that is not subject to either 'failure' mode. This means a unique 'virtual circuit' (aka data stream) to each user.