some notes
Multicast Technologies has a convenient Java-based multicast tester so you can find out if your in-house network and ISP support multicast.
Why do you want multicast? Because it allows a video stream to be broadcast to many computers simultaneously. Current internet video solutions have to open a separate stream for each receiver, which gets prohibitively expensive as soon as more than a handful of people tune in at once.
Multicast allows a single stream to be carried as far out to the edge of the network as possible before being split into individual streams.
By Chris Snyder on January 4, 2004 at 12:47pm