On 4/10/07, Christopher Woods <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
As far as I understand it, it was more a case of the BBC (and ITV) trialing broadcasting via the multicast infrastructure
Cough - Virgin Radio has been running multicast trials with the BBC for a long while too. http://www.virginradio.co.uk/about_us/technology_services/multicast/ Our trials are fully open, so please do come along and play. Similarly, GCap Media (Capital Radio, Classic FM, etc) are also multicasting. They do it automatically: if you're on a multicast network, you'll get the multicast version automatically if you visit www.capitalradio.com and listen using their embedded Windows Media Player thing, if you wanted to dissect the ASX file it gives you. We (Virgin) don't do that yet, only because I was unhappy at the delay it added to our tuning process - I may try again shortly. Here's the current issues: 1. The ISPs need to upgrade their stuff - or turn things on. Zen, for example, is a nice, small, clever, internet company so switching multicast on is pretty simple. BT is a huge, complicated, scary internet company, so switching multicast on is hugely complicated. 2. Your company or university needs to upgrade their stuff. Given that the main benefit for multicasting is from the broadcaster right now (there's no content that you couldn't otherwise get) and that multicasting is not vital for business, it's difficult to see why companies would upgrade. For example, Virgin Radio's own network is not multicast-enabled (so I have no way of listening to our swizzy 192k Windows Media streams). 3. You (yes, you) need to upgrade your stuff too. Your router, your wireless network, all of that stuff needs fiddling with to work with multicast. Even your software firewall. This isn't for the faint-of-heart right now. To give an example of how complicated all of this can get, try looking at www.opendns.com which is a (recommended) alternative DNS service for you to use instead of your slow, dull, ISP's version. Changing a DNS server address is pretty easy to do for us techies, but you still need acres of instructions - try http://www.opendns.com/start/home_network.php for one page. It's a nightmare. And remember that DNS is supported by all ISPs - multicast certainly isn't. So why do we care about multicast? Well, as the internet continues to grow, it'll become rapidly difficult if not impossible to serve millions of unicast streams to people - particularly with television. It won't just be bad for us broadcasters, it'll be bad for ISPs, and therefore bad for consumers. We need multicast to succeed: it's vital for the future of broadcasting over the internet. I think we all agree that closed trials are rather pointless; but my view (as an outsider) is that the BBC does have good reasons for that, as well as a wish to change this as soon as they are able. -- http://james.cridland.net/
