What is best for Broadcast/Multicast?

[Iznobad]

Give me your words of wisdom, please:

I will hopefully start working on a project for a national danish TV-broadcaster. I hope to persuade them, that it will not bee too hard to do a live broadcast/multicast over the internet.

The internet broadcast should show the same as the regular TV-broadcast with the following conditions:

1) Resolution and Quality should at least be equivalent to PAL TV

2) The TV-Stream must be multicast/broadcast, so the TV network only has to use the bandwidth once.

3) The bandwidth of the stream (all-included) should be a bit less than 512 kbit/s, as that is becoming a normal ADSL DL speed in my country.

4) The setup and installation of the player/codecs, should be extremely easy and as automatic as possible. A one-time download of a player is acceptable (like QuickTime or Real, for example)

5) It should not be possible for the average homeuser or HTML-shark to rip the stream to disk (I know, someone will crack any format, but as long as it takes some skill, most users will not be able to do it)


RealTime encode and rebroadcast would be ideal, but precompressing the days complete show could also be possible.


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What is the best way to do the multicast streaming?


1) MP4 with AAC ( Everwicked MP4 guide (http://www.everwicked.com/content/MPEG4IP_Guide/) ), maybe with QuickTime
2) WMV9 from MS
3) RealMedia 9
4) DivX OVS looks _very_ promising ( http://www.divxnetworks.com/products/ovs.php )

Something using DivX, XviD and ogg or AAC is probably ideal for getting optimal quality for the bandwidth, they how can they be streamed?

Cost is not the biggest problem. It's okay to use commercial software, as I assume the national TV station can afford a big server and some software for it.

So, what's your advice?

[DAvenger]

Multicast over the Internet ... impossible :(

Better use satellite to deliver the stream (you could do up to 2MBit/s if you'd like)

Take care,
DAvenger

[Iznobad]

Originally posted by DAvenger
Multicast over the Internet ... impossible :(

Better use satellite to deliver the stream (you could do up to 2MBit/s if you'd like)

Take care,
DAvenger

Uhm, I don't understand. Isn't multicasting what serves like Windows Media Streaming Server does and RealMedia? Or am I getting my terms mixed up?

I think that internet radio stations use multicast, don't they? Then it should be possible for video as well.

[DAvenger]

Well, all the above mentioned streaming server applications can operate in both unicast and multicast environment. The later is however, limited to few-segment LANs, WANs etc.

Multicast packets travels through whole network thus they must be filtered at ISPs otherwise the Internet would simply crash because of the amount of data.

Internet radio stations (does not matter if they use SHOUTcast or ASX) are unicast - bandwidth x users.

[Iznobad]

Okay, I think I understand better now, thanx!

hmm, I was wondering why all TV-stations didn't broadcast everything, now I know why :)

I thought it was sort of like a subscription, where the packets were only sent ot those who wanted them and not the whole internet. But I guess, there's no way for a single packet to have multiple recipient using ip - bugger!

Then how about some peer-to-peer video distribution? That would cut down on the bandwidth required. Any ideas for that?

[DAvenger]

Look up to the sky - what you can see (and I do not mean the 30 years old space trash :D ) is the future of broadband media distribution ;)

Also, do not forget to check your PM :)

[MfA]

Multicast is in general supported by media apps, but its only usefull for people on specialized backbones (like university networks for instance, our national government owned broadcaster had a simular project which worked with multicast on Surfnet). On the internet multicast isnt supported mainly because it is incompatible with carrier's billing and peering arrangements.

I think it would be worth a try to see if the major ISPs are interested in cooperating with this project. Maybe some have the expertise and the will to allow you to multicast on their networks, although I doubt it. Applications like this sell broadband, and with multicast the load on their backbones is minimal.

There is an alternative to multicasting on the internet though, through the wonderfull world of P2P ... client-rebroadcasting, ala bittorrent. I dont know if existing solutions would fullfill your need out of the box, but unicasting is plain not an option. So without multicasting this is your only bet. I dont know how popular this would be though, it could saturate backbones ... again, Id try to talk to the ISPs if I were you.

A quick google search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=p2p+video+streaming+drm) for "p2p video streaming drm" turned up this rather interesting solution (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=p2p+video+streaming+drm). Petty it is academic, maybe they are willing to license it though. I havent checked the rest of the results.

[Iznobad]

hmm, interesting....
It seems that they do have a working implementation (beta, of course) - I'll give it short testdrive

I had found something about ESM but never really found the homepage. here's the ESM Multicast (http://esm.cs.cmu.edu/broadcast.html) link, for others to view