IP Multicast and Content Delivery, Panel Discussion

Track A: Technology
13:45-14:30

Moderator:
Tony Ballardie, R&D Director, Global-MIX
Panel:
Michael Cooper, Head of Global Banking & Financial Markets Product Technology, BT Global Services
Andreas Heidoetting, Global Head of Webcast Technology, Markets Division, Thomson Reuters
Jonathan Rackowe, Managing Director / CEO, NetVue
Greg Shepherd, Distinguished Engineer, Cisco

The panel discussion gave an interesting overview of how Multicast is used in production nowadays. Still the session was not heavily frequented, perhaps an indicator for the awareness around this topic?

Multicast specially in video delivery has the ability to significantly reduce bandwidth requirements for large-scale live-broadcasts and thus offers a solution to possible bandwidth problems imposed by high-bandwidth video streaming. The UDP-based Multicast offers superior delivery performance, but has some disadvantages in network-level reliability and control about the distribution to every single endpoint.

The already aged multicast standard has so far been largely overlooked, even though modern multicast routing protocols like PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast), it is possible to route multicast traffic between networks and hence over the internet. The great lack of multicast on the global internet is also caused by the conflict of business interests especially with ISPs. The classic unicast-based billing models might not hold up when a customer tunnels only one multicast through the ISPs network instead of hundreds of unicasts.

The internal networks of large corporations still seem to be the main places where multicast is deployed. E.g. it was said in the CDN session earlier today, most CDNs do use multicast internally. Another interesting example brought up is the widespread use of multicast in CCTV to distribute the surveillance camera data to the viewing points.

In my opinion it would be up to the ISPs to make a proper business model around multicasting that works for everyone. In the end it's them who are moaning about their bandwidth problems. Of course there are other ways of solving the problems Peer-to-Peer delivery of video would reduce bandwidth usage due to node proximity, a thing that is anticipated my e.g. Adobe. But we can be sure that the ISPs won't like that one either, as it takes them out of the business equation even more.