Daniel, On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Daniel Roesen <dr@cluenet.de> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 05:51:25PM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Imagine: multicast internet radio! Awesome!
That would, indeed, be awesome; when everyone in my office was listening to the royal wedding, there would be a *much* higher chance of them all being in sync.
That reminds me of 9/11. When the tragic event unfolded, we sat in the office. News made the rounds verbally, and people started looking for streaming services at their personal desks (no TVs around). People pretty quickly gave up trying to find streams and news portals which were actually working fine and the crowd gathering behind me watching over my shoulder became bigger and bigger.
Why? Because I was in the fortunate position of being able to watch an Mbone multicast stream of some news TV broadcaster... cannot remember wether it was CNN or BBC or someone else entirely. Back then, a collegue was playing around with IP multicast and my desktop machine had connectivity to his Mbone-connected playground. :)
IP multicast was the only way for us to see what happened, live. Unicast failed miserably.
+10 I've been meaning to write something similar. Multicast infrastructure in place absolutely and certainly has a role to play in "humanity-wide" events. Also, having a 'free' distribution channel for those moving images carrying such licensing that it does not matter how many eyeballs see them, could be valuable as well. I made sure to get this capability in the network I worked on last. Cheers, Martin