What happened to multicasting?

What happened to multicasting?

Posted May 1, 2006 19:04 UTC (Mon) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659)
Parent article: The Rise of Media Independence (Linux Journal)

I've posted numerous .mp3 and .ogg files on the little webserver on our cable modem. The problem: with ~20-25 kB/s upload speed, if two people try to listen simultaneously, they both get nothing usable.

Though it's only a partial solution, multicasting at least solves the problem for live streams, effectively allowing a single narrow connection to serve millions of clients. So why aren't people using it more? On-demand is one possible reason, but a "software DVR" is trivial to implement...

The conspiracy theorist might say streaming is more popular because those who can afford to publicize to millions of users can afford the bandwidth to stream to lots of customers simultaneously, and the powers that be don't want the rest of us to have that capability. But the market is too efficient for that to be the answer, right?

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