[MLB-WIRELESS] Nasa Tv over MW

[Rob Wise]

On 19/09/2007, Mike Dickens <michaeldickens at gmail.com> wrote:
> "More importantly however what would happen if say 100 people all wanted
> to watch NASA TV at the same time on the network eg due to a shuttle
> launch? Would the streaming tv have to be carried 100 separate times
> across the network thus overloading the system or is there some way to
> distribute one signal across the network and people can just passively
> receive the streamed packets?"
> It'd have to be carried 100 times. That being said, it could be 'cachied' or
> 'proxied' on more localised nodes (probably the closest unix routing box, if
> it took off), so your end would only be transmitting it a few times then the
> node closest to the user would deal with it.

Actually if it was broadcast over MW using Multicast then only 1
stream would be carried over each network link and then broken out
locally to x number of local viewers.  More info on multicast is
available at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

This is how Pay TV broadcasts over IP networks operate.  The same
technique is often used in hotel TV systems too.  It's probably worth
noting that many if not all of the current MW nodes probably wouldn't
handle multicast distribution on their present hardware.

Cheers,

Rob