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I can't believe I'm considering this, but at this point what the hell. Anyone had an experience with IP TV setups? Specifically systems that use multicast to deliver the content and thereby reducing network traffic? I'm considering a system like this and looking at maybe just translating some of the area's over the air channels into a multicast stream or maybe even getting more slick and doing a Direct TV headend.

I'm currently working on IPTV. Most system don't support multicast.

Do you use Ubnt ? If I remeber well, Airmax line don't support multicast and transfer it into some kind of round robin unicast but the thread about this is old.
https://community.ubnt.com/t5/airOS-Sof ... d-p/228197

I know IPTV been done by a Russian ISP with ePMP and multicast.

Currently, most use HLS or DASH unicast with a NGINX proxy where customer connect to. You can have multiple cheap embeded x86 device with NGINX as proxy. A lot install a proxy by OLT in fiber deployement. This way, the're only one stream by backhole but a stream by customer between ONT and OLT or CPE (SM) and AP.

looking at maybe just translating some of the area's over the air channels into a multicast stream

I am pretty sure your not allowed to do this without agreements from the broadcasters?

Almost all my customers use Netflix/HULU/Apple TV/Direct TV with the cost of bandwidth not sure doing a headend is cost effective?

I understand wanting to reduce load on your wireless network but with these types of services people are always watching something different and or at different parts of the broadcast so all the streams are different.

I use all the above services as my house other than recently dropped Netflix for personal reasons.

sirhc wrote:

looking at maybe just translating some of the area's over the air channels into a multicast stream

I am pretty sure your not allowed to do this without agreements from the broadcasters?

Yes... this would be a major no-no, and expensive legal battle / fines.


The Netflix OCA is an interesting box that is N/C for qualifying ISPs: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

We have the somewhat unique benefit of being able to deploy the majority of our content and software updates proactively during off­peak fill windows. Because we can predict with high accuracy what our members will watch and what time of day they will watch it, we make use of non­peak bandwidth to download the vast majority of content updates to the OCAs in our network during these configurable time windows. OCAs can also download updates from each other ­ minimizing significant usage of internet “backbone” capacity during the update cycle.

We recently acquired an ISP that also use to be a cable TV provider, which gives us a fair degree of rebroadcast agreements already in place ;) Because of that the legal piece looks to fall into place pretty easy. Now it's on to the technical requirements and if it's really feasible. The more interesting thing is we have better access to most of the local channels than any of the major streaming providers do, which is a big draw in our area.

Multicast is quite an interesting deployment option for this sort of thing because it requires only a single stream across the entire network for each channel and because endpoints can "subscribe" to each stream based on what channel their watching it also only goes where it's needed. A prime example would be the super bowel, everyone with the service watching it on ABC would be subscribed to the ABC steam with an IGMP message. Which would be substantially better for our network verses XX number of streams running ultra HD or 4k.