From: Rick Astley [mailto:jnanog@gmail.com] I think most the points made here are valid about why it isn't an easy problem to solve with multicast. Lets say for instance they had a multicast stream that sent the most popular content (which to Randy's point may not cover much) and 48 hours of that stream was cached locally on the CPE. What is the additional cost to expand each of these CPE's to handle this? Will it be HD or SD or both? Are people willing to Sacrafice their Xbox and PS3 disk space? Does the $60 Roku become the $400 Roku? Does securing all the content then become more difficult? What is the hard drive failure rate of these devices with them constantly writing to disk?
What incentive do users have to to shell out the money for a device that will handle this caching? Multicasting this type of content seems to create more problems than it solves.
Lots of people already cache multicast streams to disk at home. I have a Humax digital TV cache (PVR ;-) that caches HD and SD content for me automatically. Doing the same over a network is not that much more of a jump really. My Humax box already has Ethernet to my home network, grabbing a multicast feed is no more than a software feature. So in a way people already pay to do just this. Indeed, in the UK, SKY offer a movies service which I believe you can cache locally if you have a SKY+ thing. So, SKY do it now and people pay for it. -- Leigh ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________