On Tue Nov 21, 2017 at 09:09:06AM -0600, Mike Hammett wrote:
Unicasting what everyone watches live on a random evening would use significantly more bandwidth than Game of Thrones or whatever OTT drop. Magnitudes more. It wouldn't even be in the same ballpark.
In the UK our VoD (branded iPlayer) is approx 5% of consumption, the rest is linear broadcast channels. While we're planning for the day it is 100% IP there is quite a lot to do before we get there. One thing we've tested is the DASM extension to DASH streaming to allow clients to transparently consume unicast or multicast. Most would be unicast consumers but some networks use multicast for tv channel delivery. This allows their clients to adapt (and mix so for rewind can switch to unicast, the watch this live programme from the beginning buttton is quite popular) rather than having a different client (lots of caveats in there) Today our CDNs would not handle a popular programme with a 15M audience. They could be scaled up and some ISPs have placed CDN nodes closer to their edge to help that. Others already have internal multicast or are working on it. We'll use whatever works best. brandon