The sort of thing that multicast was intended to solve, instead of everyone requesting their own stream of the same data. But MC never gained traction even though most ISPs in the UK are now IPv6-enabled.
IPv6 doesn't have anything to do with multicast - it works fine on v4. For some definition of works - the only industry where I've heard of it being used extensively is finance.
For live events like press conferences or sports this is already solved with broadcasting.
> the only industry where I've heard of it being used extensively is finance.
> For live events like press conferences or sports this is already solved with broadcasting.
16 million people watched that press conference on BBC TV, broadcasting is very efficent at getting live pictures out. The BBC did experiment with multicast in the past, but CDNs seem to be a more scalable solution ironically.
However in this specific case, the pictures actually left downing street via multicast (SDI form camera into encoder, MPEG-TS over multicast to the studio, back to SDI to get encoded on whichever output chain it is - Terrestial, Satelite, Cable, online)
Indeed the standard to replace SDI (2110) is built around multicast, broadcast certainly uses multicast a fair bit.
This wasn't any stream of the announcement driving this; this was people looking up statistics and information about COVID-19 and related restrictions.
