Re: Multicast Traffic on Backbones

Folks have given a number of interesting multimedia applications using multicast, but I'm not sure any of them really need multicast. Akamia/iBeam/Skycache, or any other set of large memory buffer boxes around the network edge, seem to be a much better way to replicate multimedia streams, and even provide the popular VCR start/pause/stop effect. This works well for single sourced (or limited source) multimedia streams that have very little interaction with the recipient (aka TV for the Internet). Multicast seems to be more efficient for updating large buffer edge boxes than delivering the content directly to the end-user.