I'd love to try the BBC Multicast Technical Trial:
The BBC & ITV intend to test the technical possibilities of streaming more of their TV channels via broadband. We intend to Multicast these. This should result in a higher quality viewer experience. We are running this technical trial to seek some feedback about the quality and availability of these TV channels.
For the channels available, go here.
My ISP, the excellent Zen, does a good job of explaining what Multicast is:
Multicast is way of streaming video over the Internet in an efficient way. For example all Zen Internet customers wanting to watch the BBC News stream can get the stream from Zen’s network rather than getting multiple copies from the BBC. This helps reduce the amount of bandwidth required by large organisations wanting to stream content to many users, and reduces costs to the ISP receiving that content too. This means that more streams of a high quality can be provided to many more people.
Both my routers are Draytek (2600G and 2800: great build quality) and neither yet supports the Multicast IGMP protocol, it seems. The 2600 series may never support it. Zen's forum entry on Multicast Routers calls both series incompatible, but Draytek's UK forum has this admin posting (login required):
Multicast is in development for the Vigor2800 series, although it is not yet part of the official specification. There are generally two parts to operation, IGMP Proxy (available as a 'beta' function already on Vigor2800) and IGMP Snooping which should be available in beta soon.
To enable IGMP Proxy, use telnet command "ip igmp_proxy".
Note : this applies to Vigor2800 series only. Older ADSL models do not have the capacity for this additional function.
So, I'll give Multicast a whirl at the weekend when I'm running off the 2800 router. Anyone else having fun trying to get Multicast working at home?
Technorati tags: BBC, Multicast, IGMP, streaming, Zen, Draytek
