----- Original Message -----
From: "George Bonser" <gbonser@seven.com>
It doesn't make sense for a lot of on-demand access but makes a lot of sense for live content like radio talk shows, news, sports, etc. Even webcams could be upgraded to provide streaming content rather than individual frames without chewing up a lot of resources. It wouldn't matter if 1 or 1 million people are watching, the bandwidth resource requirement would remain the same.
If there are 10,000 Comcast subscribers watching exactly the same live event on the net, sending 10,000 streams of exactly the same data is dumb and it doesn't have to be that way.
And, more to the point, as we proceed more and more into a live-tweet, social TV world, *having all your viewers within a second or two of each other* becomes more and more important. My experience is that that's *much* easier to manage in a multicast environment, than with live-unicast streaming -- especially when there are multiple server clusters in different places for load balancing. Cheers, -- jra