Bottom Line Bottom Line A Hard Look at Multimedia by Joel Snyder Multicasting is one answer to minimizing Net traffic. Meanwhile, use resources wisely. Multicast and multimedia are closely related.
Multimedia usually means moving the bits from one place to another on the Internet.
On the Air There are two problems involved in moving enough data around to allow thousands of people to see Star Trek captains Kirk and Picard in multimedia motion. First, even though the backbone of the Internet is composed of very high-speed links, it's wasteful to send the same data repeatedly on the same expensive shared resource. When the lines are between North America and Europe, the problem is more acute because bandwidth is expensive. It would be a better use of scarce resources to avoid sending the same data over the backbone more than once. The second problem is more subtle.