----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Barry" <trbarry@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Nobody has shown any interest in implementing it but if multicasting was set up properly there would be little problem with 20 million simultaneous (720p HD) web viewers of a live Super Bowl. Note this would be appointment Internet viewing, commercials and all, not on demand download. But for something as popular as the Super Bowl it would probably be worth it. I still believe there is a tier of Internet viewing that could have the same economy of scale as will popular network events if anybody actually allowed it to happen.
Multicasting is not mature enough to even begin to replace satellite distributed programming on a nationwide scale. So far it only works within walled gardens.
From Wikipedia's multicast entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast"No mechanism has yet been demonstrated that would allow the IP multicast model to scale to millions of senders and millions of multicast groups and, thus, it is not yet possible to make fully-general multicast applications practical. For these reasons, and also reasons of economics, IP multicast is not in general use in the commercial Internet."
John
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