But how many people really stream the same content at the exact same time anymore these days?
Large sports events are probably the only remaining application where broadcast would still see much advantage over individual streams.
In the case of a few simultaneous viewers, unicast can sometimes still use bandwidth more efficiently in case of a(since the transmitter precisely knows the receiver’s SNR and doesn’t need to waste any energy transmitting at the wrong coding rate or the wrong direction/place). That’s how modern 802.11 (Wi-Fi) often does reliable multicast, these days.
A seamless transition from unicast to multicast once the critical ratio of listeners per base station is reached would be very cool, but require pretty deep levels of integration between broadcasters and ISPs that are probably not worth it.
They mean "audio streaming" ala "video streaming" not like audio downloading to your device streaming. The stream means live download not just download through the net.
FYI, I work for a big sports streaming company and we are doing "mABR" or multicast adaptive bitrate with some ISPs because it really is worth it. You get a significant improvement in playback stats and the ISP gets massive traffic offload from their network. We started with one big ISP in Italy, then other ISPs saw what we were doing and asked to join in.
That being said, it really is a pain in the arse to build. It's also largely proprietary solutions (yes it's multicast but getting the player to find the content isn't a standard) and it's hard for the ISP to update ALL their routers to support it (even when they want it).
Large sports events are probably the only remaining application where broadcast would still see much advantage over individual streams.
In the case of a few simultaneous viewers, unicast can sometimes still use bandwidth more efficiently in case of a(since the transmitter precisely knows the receiver’s SNR and doesn’t need to waste any energy transmitting at the wrong coding rate or the wrong direction/place). That’s how modern 802.11 (Wi-Fi) often does reliable multicast, these days.
A seamless transition from unicast to multicast once the critical ratio of listeners per base station is reached would be very cool, but require pretty deep levels of integration between broadcasters and ISPs that are probably not worth it.
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