Re: The scale of streaming video on the Internet.

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Dec 2, 2010, at 2:01 PM, david raistrick wrote:

> On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, Antonio Querubin wrote:
>
> > > -entire- end to end IP network, it will be significantly broken significant amounts of the time.
> >
> > Which points to the need for service providers to deploy robust multicast routing.
>
> No doubt - it also points to multicast itself needing a bit more sanity and flexibility for implimentation.   When 
> you have to tune -every- l3 device along the path for each stream, well....
It's not quite that bad. I've done multiple multicast implementations where this was utterly unnecessary, but, it does 
take
some configuration on most L3 devices to make it work reasonably well.

> As Owen pointed out, perhaps carriers will eventually be motivated to make this happen in order to reduce their own 
> bandwidth costs.  Eventually.
>
> In the meantime, speaking with my content hat on, we stick with unicast. :)
Wrong answer, IMHO. Where it makes sense, use multicast with a fast fallback to unicast if multicast isn't working.
In this way, it helps build the case that deploying multicast will save $$$. Without it, the mantra will be "Multicast
doesn't matter, even if we implement it, none of the content will use it."

Owen