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Technology Stocks : RealNetworks (NASDAQ:RNWK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (273)	2/27/1998 7:27:00 AM
From: Roger Bass	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5843

Scott, I agree with your comments. You are clearly more familiar with the details of multicast than I am, though I have given some thought to the problem. It was clear to me that supporting non-simultaneous broadband content on demand would require hierarchical caching as you say. It was not clear to me that this was not currently supported by the multicast standards - in any case, one way or another, that's clearly where things will be heading. Incidentally, this will all raise some interesting business issues: - are network operators free to cache any content they want within their network to conserve bandwidth (they're doing this now) ? - what can content providers do to ensure they get the information about who is viewing their content, when and how ? - how will it be determined when cached content gets refreshed? Users could risk getting old versions of the content they want unless appropriate content description conventions exist. - network operators will have costs related to caching different content. Will their users pay for this, or the content providers? Content providers who use 'inefficient' coding algorithms (eg MPEG3 vs whatever), may have their content transcoded by a network operator to reduce its size. WebTV already does this with GIF to JPEG conversion in passing pages down (though this is on-the-fly, and aimed at improving performance through the modem bottleneck). Regards, Roger.