@Emma7577
Most web transactions, and streaming, is Unicast. You ask the other end for a connection, to watch a movie say, and it creates a path to your box, or TV, or whatever, and serves you down that. It’s personal to you, so you can pause it, rewind it, and so on.
But if ten thousand people want to watch the movie, that’s ten thousand paths opened. Unavoidable for true on demand - but when you are watching something on a ‘live’ channel (we say linear, to distinguish it from the ‘live’ of a football match, say) it’s pretty wasteful.
What if EETV could send out just a single stream, and everyone joined it? Ten thousand, twenty thousand people, EETV put just one copy out onto the net? So when you ask for that programme, the internet says “OK then” and registers your interest in watching it, and in the blink of an eye the internet finds the EETV stream, and clones a copy of it, coming to you. So it’s the internet, all that equipment on it, multiplying up that one copy that EETV put out for everyone who wants it, and is authorised to have it.
That’s multicast. When you think about it, very much like an internet version of broadcast. And like broadcast, though, you can’t pause or rewind it, and if you miss a bit, then you can’t get it back. So you have to keep up, and this puts more of a demand on your device.
But everything has to be right for multicast. EETV have to configure it properly, all the equipment it passes through has to understand multicast, and when it finally gets to you, your router, anything in the pathway from router to box, and the box itself, have to understand and correctly pass multicast. And additionally, they have to know which device or devices want the multicast, or they will send it to all your devices, whether they want it or not, and swamp your network.
So, brilliant when it works; but when it goes wrong, it’s a complete nightmare to find and fix the problems. Two months and counting? Yes, in a couple of cases here.
It’s not for nothing that with all its theoretical upsides, multicast isn’t used by the EETV AppleTV box. I guess somebody decided that there were too many downsides, and with a blank sheet of paper for the new box, decided not to implement it.
I guess EETV can’t easily drop it on the Box Pro and Box Mini though. And it pretty much works for everybody, albeit perhaps after one or two initial hiccups, perhaps entirely smoothly as for me.
There was a little girl,
and she had a little curl
right in the middle of her forehead,
And when she was good,
she was very very good
and when she was bad,
she was horrid,
I guess her name was Multicast 😛
*Longtime YouView box owner & broadband customer (was BT now EE), but only recently a full EETV subscriber*
