Journal Sloppy's Journal: multicast video: someone's finally doing it 1
I've long advocated that the future of video delivery should either be multicast, or old-school protocols like HTTP combined with caching at the ISP. (Why all ISPs don't run transparent Squids, I still don't understand.) Bittorrent just isn't the right way to do it.
Thanks to Freedom To Tinker I've just learned that someone is using multicast to deliver TV.
Except it's not available in my area, and still requires propriety DVRs/STBs, which I assume means that it probably uses DRM and therefore has massive interoperability problems.
But it's a start. I hadn't heard of anyone actually doing it, before now.
That's weird (Score:1)
I always thought multicasting would be the only way to deliver this kind of material. Seems to me it also solves the upstream bandwidth issue that the ISPs use to deny us a symmetrical connection. What took so long? Is it all about "protecting content"? Do the ISPs block people from doing it? It doesn't seem like it would be more expensive or anything. Eh, let's hope it catches on.