Way back when I left the world of network engineering and became an analyst (circa 1999) my first assignment was to write a technology brief on the topic of IP multicast. At the time, IP multicast was emerging as a means to optimize the delivery of streaming video across enterprise data networks. In most cases this was to support the broadcast of town halls or executive addresses to employees. IP multicast solved a very real problem for one-to-many broadcasts: How to ensure that streams didn’t overwhelm the network.
