Hi,

There is also a "cart and horse" issue here: Where is the pervasive content?

At the risk of sounding somewhat cynical, I suspect the market driver for IP multicast will be what it often is for these sort of things: pr0n. My prediction? When one of the big adult hosting speciality companies starts IP multicasting free full length "cable cut" R-rated adult films in watchable MPEG1 quality, people will begin lobbying their ISP's for IP multicast support. Evidence supporting this assertion can be found in the popularity of events such as the Victoria Secret webcast, which reportedly drew more than a million viewers worldwide, even when streaming video was being done at postage-stamp-sized resolution. Of course, at the same time the pr0n channels get rolled out, there will also need to be something innocuous, like the "Field Hockey Channel" or the "Brand-New-Bands-Live!-From-Small-Clubs Channel" so that people will be able to use those less-embarassing content choices as their nominal interest when calling to request IP multicast support: "Um, hi, my friends who connect via ISP Foo up the street tell me that if you do something to your network I can get the, uh, Field Hockey channel via IC muteypast. I'm, uh, a real big field hockey fan, and I'd really love to be able to watch, uh, field hockey on my PC."

Most content providers don't want multicast because it breaks their billing model. They can't tell how many viewers they have at a given moment, what the average viewing time is, or any of the other things that unicast allows them to determine and more importantly bill their advertisers for.

That's why they'll go ahead and use it as a tease/for the free publicity they'll get if they're the first ones to do it. People have spent a lot more on publicity stunts that would get a lot less coverage than this sort of thing would.

There is no Nielsen's Ratings for multicast so that advertisers could get a feel for how many eyeballs they are going to hit.

Some IP multicast products *do* offer the ability to track viewership (albeit at the cost of some degradation to IP multicast's otherwise essentially perfect scalability). Cisco's StreamWatch is one example that comes to mind. Regards, Joe