I never got into this aspect of networking, so I truly don't know what I'm talking about and wish someone will correct me, but on some level, IP does indeed have broadcast/multicast capabilities that cause the sender's egress traffic to remain independent of the number of recipients rather than being equal to the sum of recipients' ingress traffic, right? Does this only work downstream of the last router, and therefore has limited usefulness on the internet?
> IP does indeed have broadcast/multicast capabilities that cause the sender's egress traffic to remain independent of the number of recipients rather than being equal to the sum of recipients' ingress traffic, right?
Yes multicast, however you can't do multicast over the internet. In practise the technology is mainly used in production and enterprise scenarios (broadcast, signage, hotels, stadiums, etc).
Instead big streaming platforms like netflix or twich use CDN boxes installed locally at major ISPs. Also with so much hardware acceleration on modern NICs these days, it's surprisingly easy to handle Gbits of throughput for audio/video streaming.
I think you are right. Multicast is typically udp and only available on your local net if the router is configured for it. I haven't used multicast in along so I might be wrong. I remember network updates breaking it.
I wouldn't they don't care. It just wasn't problem for them. But basically yes. I blindly checked few of the TV's listed for my country and every one of them had live stream on Google publicly available somewhere.
But is this really a concern for them? If they are making money from advertisement this just add them justification for higher price of an ad.
They aren't making money from this, but they are likely operating at a scale where they either don't notice if 1000 nerds on the internet are piggybacking their feeds, or don't care all that much.
It is not likely useful to them in negotiating ad rates, at least not with how advertising is usually bought/sold, because the broadcaster has almost no information (if any) about anyone watching these streams, including if it's even a person. It's possible they could fold it into a more general ad package that places a lot of weight on total view/viewers numbers, but that is a lot less common these days, and when it is done, the rates tend to be much lower
Yea I meant it is an argument they can use but not a good metric at all. I agree that mostly they just do not care. This tool only means that they'll get more international views from curious people but in the end it means nothing.
So, there are a bunch of open http endpoints serving free video feeds and they don't care about bandwidth?
It's not like radio where you broadcast it and people passively receive the signal.
This is a great service for language practice, though. Wish it had a login + favorites system.