RE: [kNT] Multicasting [was -- akamai]

["John McHugh" <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick,
Spot on the money and I'll emphasise money. That's a lot of senior salary's
you're addressing there. You wouldn't want to start messing with them now
would you? You could well be describing the content owners here having a
server all of their own and delivering their content, which they get paid
directly for, to the end user direct, could you not? This is the huge fear
behind the majors, if I give you a simple breakdown of the cost of a cd for
example:
HMV top forty let's say mid price £12.59
VAT:£1.88
Artist: Under a £1
Packaging: £1.20
Promotion: £1.30
Dealer: £1.50
Distributor: £1.75
Record Company: about a fiver
So say your content owner sells 10 million copies that's just over a £100
million pounds between the last five! I am aware that this is off track a
little but it does have major parts to play in the bigger picture.
If you follow the money you'll find as many obstacles that we don't know
about as we're trying to solve.
John

Nick said,
"Multicast wouldn't just be beneficial to media based content... ICQ gets
downloaded about a million times in a bad week... last time I looked the
file is about 5mb in size... If you do the maths that uses up quite a
lot of bandwidth... I'm sure caching helps to a certain degree. If you
were to distribute this type of content using multicast with a constant
stream of about 6mbits from the server you could cater for millions and
millions of simultaneous downloads and the best bit is the speed would
be very quick as the content is actually coming from the "wire" rather
than a source server or even an edge server. And for the provider a half
decent server could deal with ALL the traffic no more load balanced
server farms."