On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 11:49:11AM -0500, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Even worse, multicast is truly only suitable for live applications; on-demand content can't be realistically mcasted, and users will not settle for "the movie starts every 15 minutes"
Just for the sake of argument I'll point out that this is exactly how DirecTV offers PPV movies... each of the 30-odd movies available for viewing in a given month are listed on one or more channels with defined start times. Obviously this may not translate to on-demand movie streaming over the internet, but since DirecTV seems to be at least a little bit successful with this approach you may not want to be so quick to rule it out. Whether people will pay money to watch movies streamed over the Internet (as opposed to traditional media such as cable or satellite) is an entirely different question, of course. --Jeff