> Subject: RE: How do you put a TV station on the Mbone? > Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:15:42 -0700 > From: George Bonser <gbon...@seven.com> > > > > > > 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. > > > > Cheers, > > -- jra > > Exactly. If more people/networks took advantage of multicast, it would > greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements, particularly for live events. > If there were 50 people listening to a popular radio show or watching a > live TV event in your office, for example, there would be only one feed > crossing the wire into your office. And only one feed crossing into your > provider's network. > > I have *no* idea why applications developers have not been more > interested in this, particularly with radio and television stations > providing live streams on the net. It is absolutely a waste of resources > to have a separate stream for each listener of a live event.
There's a layer 9 (or is it 10? <wry grin> -- required for legal reasons) answer for that. Radio/television stations are required to pay 'performance' royalties to the 'authors' and 'performers' of the works they transmit over the internet. Those royalties are based on the _actual_number_ of persons tuning in to each such work. No 'averaging', no 'estimating', nothing based on 'ratings', or other 'sampling techniques -- you have to count the _actual_number_ of people tuned in. It gets messy, but you have to have 'auditable' records of when each person 'tuned in', and when they 'tuned out'. One _has_ to be able to detect the latter condition under all possible circumstances. This means you must use a 'loss of signal' methodology. You can't trust the tuned-in listener to _actually_ stop listening "just because" they said they would. The people getting the royalties will claim the tuned-in party lied, and they're due royalties even after they said they're tuning out. The people _paying_ the fees won't accept having to pay for people who 'tuned out' in 'non-standard' ways. Ways like a program (or O/S, for that matter) crash, 'backhoe fade, etc. One party worries about people -not- tuning out when they said they are. The other worries about people tuning out -without- saying they are. The only to keep both sides happy is to use a methodology that is not subject to either 'failure' mode. This means a unique 'virtual circuit' (aka data stream) to each user.
