----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeffrey S. Young" <young@jsyoung.net>
I think it's elegant, in think Deering did an incredible job to create it and some many years ago I played a role to bring multicast to the Internet at large. I believed that multicast would play a huge role in the delivery of content, then.
Trouble was that the way that people want to consume video means most of it is time-shifted. Folks in charge of networks didn't understand the technology and marketing people thought turning on multicast meant giving something away. I finally settled on the notion that multicast is a tool for service providers/enterprises to use but that it wouldn't ever be as pervasive as I'd hoped.
I think that George's POV -- which is also mine -- is that as the world shifts, the percentage of video distribution which is amenable to multicast, and not well served by unicast, is likely to grow, and it would be a Good Idea to be ready for that situation already when it arrives. Cheers, -- jra