Why would you want to stream in unicast when there are already models for effective multicast content delivery (see Michael's list)? *See point above!*
The word "multicast" in the above quote, does not refer to the set of protocols called "IP multicast". Content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai are also, inherently, a form of multicasting. So are P2P networks like BitTorrent and EMule. If this sounds odd to you, perhaps you don't really understand the basics of either multicast or P2P. Check out Wikipedia to see what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast If your data absolutely, positively, must be delivered simultaneously to multiple destinations, i.e. time is of the essence, then I agree that P2P and IP multicast are not comparable. But the context of this discussion is not NYSE market data feeds, but entertainment video. The use-cases for entertainment mean that timing is of little importance. More important are things like consistency and control. --Michael Dillon