Curiously enough, this latter capability may come as a surprise. While the consumer market will wait years for HDTV to penetrate the installed base, today's computer monitors can display HDTV feeds just fine. More remarkably, several vendors actually showed working prototypes of the technology. The buzz was that actual product wouldn't be years off, but rather just a few months or maybe a year away. Simply put, it's much, much easier for today's systems to display video.
Solutions are available for both types.
Most network routers, however, limit broadcasts to just a single subnetwork. Multicasts are fully supported in IP networks, but often are not implemented since they do require setup. We'll see later that sending HDTV signals over networks requires setting up a Multicast. With all three types of video throughput, users can typically request their own video when they want, but with Unicast, they can pause, rewind, and replay the stream, something they cannot do with broadcasts or Multicasts. To anticipate and prepare for potential bottlenecks, users must consider where the video will be expected to go and what it will need to get there, with network bandwidth being the most critical consideration.