connection for each media player client. This is
connection for each media player client. This is called unicasting. In this example you would have to transmit 500 + 1,000 + 500 (= 2,000) separate content streams. The webcaster can look with envy at the television broadcaster. With one transmitter and one tower the broadcaster can reach every resident living within his or her service area. In a metropolitan area he or she can reach an audience of several million people. As a webcaster you have to provide server resource for each viewer, plus the bandwidth of the Internet has to be sufficient to carry all the streams that you want to serve. Multicasting offers an alternative to conventional streaming or unicasting. A single stream is served to the Internet as a multicast. All the viewers then can attach to the same stream. The client initiates a multicast; the server just delivers the stream to the network. Further viewers just attach to the same stream. The server has no knowledge of where the stream is going, unlike the normal TCP client server handshaking interactions of an Internet connection. A client will be made aware of a multicast by some out-of-band channel; it could be by e-mail or through publicity on a web site. The viewer then requests the multicast at the appropriate date and time. An alternative is to use the session announcement protocol. Note that you can broadcast to a network, but it is not like a television broadcast. It is used by network administrators for control messages, and does not propagate beyond the local subnet. Multicasting sounds like a very efficient solution to the resource problems of delivering a webcast to very large audiences. But there are catches. First, it can be used only for live or simulated live webcasting. You lose the interactivity of on-demand streaming. The second drawback is that many older network routers do not support multicasting. There are ways around this: Multicast streams can be tunneled through legacy plant, and the multicast enabled backbone (MBone) can be used. Many of the problems have restricted its use to corporate networks (intranets). Large public webcasts have had to resort to conventional splitting and caching to guarantee delivery to all potential clients. Note that multicasting is not limited to streaming; it also can be used for general data delivery (like database upgrades across a dispersed enterprise, or for video conferencing). Multicast address allocation Most IP addresses that are classless (CIDR) fall into Class C. If you work for a very large corporation or government department, then you may use the Class A and B address spaces. Multicasting uses a reserved set of IP addresses in Class D, ranging from 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255. To make public Internet multicasts you will need a unique address. Although some addresses are permanently allocated to hosts, they are usually transient and allocated for a single 22 The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming
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