Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

On Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:29:32 EST, Gian Constantine said:

If you considered my previous posts, you would know I agree streaming is scary on a large scale, but unicast streaming is what I reference. Multicast streaming is the real solution. Ultimately, a global multicast network is the only way to deliver these services to a large market.

Multicast streaming may be a big win when you're only streaming the top 5 or 10 networks (for some value of 5 or 10). What's the performance characteristics if you have 300K customers, and at any given time, 10% are watching something from the "long tail" - what's the difference between handling 30K unicast streams, and 30K multicast streams that each have only one or at most 2-3 viewers?