One thing you can say for traditional broadcast media: They scale really well. If you put an analog signal on the air or on a wire with enough repeaters and amplifiers, it will serve every client that connects. That’s not the case with most of the network world, unfortunately. Sure we have multicast, but that’s not on an Internet scale — and the Internet is where the problems lie.
First, let’s define multicast as used in IP networks. This is a method by which a single source stream can be accessed by multiple clients simultaneously, without increasing the load on the source itself. Thus, this functions much like an analog broadcast: You have a single source that a client can connect to at any time. The downside is that the client is a silent subscriber of the content and cannot control the stream; there’s no rewinding or restarting on a per-client basis. This is content broadcast over IP, and it’s what television networks use to distribute video streams through their networks, financial institutions to receive stock quotes, and so forth.
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