Idea to save bandwidth for media streaming

[Falloutboy]

I was thinking last night of how everything is migrating towards using the internet for being the primary media/communcation hub. I was thinking that todays cable modems are more than cabable of streaming pretty good quality video but the problem I see why say you could acess TV online is the vast bandwidth the server would be required to send out to the thousands of viewers.

So I thought why couldn't the server send out one stream and have a tag on it for when it hits say a major backbone on the internet it would send to every IP watching the stream. is this at all a feasable idea?

 

[Torghn]

Yes, and they can sort of do that now, but someone still has to supply all that bandwith.

 

[Falloutboy]

but wouldn't it be easier to beef up the major data pathways to support more bandwidth than trying to add more bandwidth to every smaller data pathway. but now that I think of it you'd only be moving where the limiting factor would be it wouldn't be the server it would the the data pathways leading to the receaver. Well proubly much smarter people thean me will figure this problem out.

 

[CTho9305]

Isn't that basically multicast?

 

[zeusfaber]

multicast is basically where one address is assigned to multiple interfaces. at least for IPv6 it is.

 

[Peter]

Proxy servers do exactly that.

 

[spidey07]

multicast is what your are talking about. A Class D destination IP address - 224.0.0.0 - 239.255.255.255. For example I stream HD channels to thousands of users.

The server only has to send out one stream and then it up to the actual network to replicate the data and send it to the appropriate nodes. If you ever run out of server processing or bandwidth then just add more servers or caching devices. The network does all the "work" especially the router which still only receives just one stream from its upstream neighbors and then sends the stream out to interfaces the need it.

Do a search on PIM or Protocol Independant Multicast. It is the multicast protocol the controls the forwarding of mcast streams. or mbone or m-ospf.

 

[isaacmacdonald]

Do caches help for on-demand stuff? IE: is it still possible to multicast with on-demand media, and what are the kinds of limitations and cache sizes we're talking about here?

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: isaacmacdonald
Do caches help for on-demand stuff? IE: is it still possible to multicast with on-demand media, and what are the kinds of limitations and cache sizes we're talking about here?

Caches are really about storing content. Content can be anything - web pages, movies, music, on-demand, pay-per-view. Disk space is cheap.

The idea behind a robust caching architecture is "push the content closer to the customer/user". It doesn't mean push everything to a cache device, but the device reacts to demand caching what it thinks it should or what the administrator told it to.

So yes, a cache device can hold multicast or anything you wish. The cable boxes themselves could in essence become a cache device pulling data from its nearest peer/node which is kindof how on-demand works now.

 

[Howard]

Spidey, you just had to screw up the page formatting didn't you!