Yes, especially for folks not at home. It’s common to see multicast used in places where internet bandwidth is constrained, but network maybe not so much.
For example, maybe you have an older hotel, or a cruise ship or a hospital or a retirement home. It’s expensive to just buy better internet backhaul, and it’s expensive to retrofit those rooms, and you can lose a lot of money for every day the room is down.
But, with multicast, you can use the legacy internet connection and the legacy wiring in the room, but easily/cheaply ensure every room has a working TV with full broadcast TV or satellite TV, and anyone watching that is not pulling 5mbps to 10mbps from your internet backhaul.
It also all works from a single remote control, and it doesn’t ask you to log into anything, it doesn’t need your cell phone for anything, etc.
It’s niche, but there’s a number of places where it makes sense.
I have a gigabit down, and a ~50TB local Plex server.
Sometimes, well… often, it’s just nice to channel-surf as a low-commitment way to find something to watch, to be surprised by something, etc. I’ll otherwise frequently be paralysed by choice and/or fall back on the same playlist of shows, over and over.
Plenty of others online have documented similar experiences. It’s why there’s an ecosystem of projects looking to emulate traditional TV experiences using Plex / local media libraries. To use a Claude-ism: it’s not just nostalgia-bait, there are genuine advantages to watching things this way. I’ve been doing it long enough for any novelty / shine to have worn off.
AT&T does (or did) use multicast for cable tv replacement...
"Except for"? Sportsball events are some of the simultaneously most-watched things out there.
Heck, I bet a lot of the streaming services wish they could do multicast over the Internet instead of CDNs for episodic releases.
To demonstrate...multicast TV distribution on a home network?
> For small home networks, there is no bandwidth difference between this and streaming solutions like Jellyfin.
Jellyfin and multicast TV distribution are not the same things, though. They're very different.
Some other things that are very different include: The temperature of Lake Superior, my mother's collection of weird ceramic houses that light up, and red herring.
> Yes, this was a cool technology,
Multicast has ceased to be a cool technology? That's hot.
> and if some large provider like AT&T wanted to use this to broadcast channels to everyone at once
They do that.
> it would've made more sense than streaming
They do that, as well.
> but even for that use case the world has moved on.
All of it? Uniformly?
> Does anyone watch scheduled television anymore except local news and sportsball?
We should not use multicast TV distribution on home networks for local news and sportsball?
Put it on RPi (as it could skip transcodnig and pass media streams as-is) and put into the box :)
We are on HN, after all!
So multicast is when you want hardware outboard of the server to do all the distribution, the maximum number of simultaneous client users is then not limited by the server resources since the server itself only serves that one stream to a single IP address no matter how many users or not tap into the stream beyond that point.
The more familiar default approach for more common servers and routers is not multicast, but regular unicast instead. Where the server allows individual asynchronous interactions directly with each user like you expect in a common office network (or the internet), hardly anything identical is intended to be accessed simultaneously by the clients. But of course the server then needs to handle the distribution to each user individually like in a basic office network, which can add up to a lot of IP connections for the server to contend with compared to only a single IP if it was multicast.
So the number of simultaneous users is then limited by the number of connections that the server itself can maintain under unicast, which is an un-necessary additional bottleneck that can be avoided by using multicast if everything on that "channel" is going to always be simultaneous anyway.
Not my downvote btw.