> Netflix makes servers that can be distributed to the ISP's
Distributing servers to every ISP doesn't seem very efficient. It may work in the US where I you can count the number of ISPs on one hand, but where I live there are 100+.
> Distributing servers to every ISP doesn't seem very efficient.
Actually that's the way most CDN's work. Instead of having 40 hops to your customer, you may only have to have 10 because the first thirty hops are from you to your server.
Less congestion issues, higher uptime, lower latency and faster bandwidth usually.
> Has multicast ever worked?
In my experience with military networks, yes. Especially when one multicast packet can be received by 20 listeners without repeating the packet 20 times on the physical layer (especially radio links).
Sending data via bittorrent would saturate links you wouldn't want saturated.
IPTV services are usually based on multicast and seem to work quite efficiently. But it's obviously useless for services like Netflix/Youtube/etc. because you have to be sending the same content to everyone at the same time.
No, multicast for IPTV is not cost efficient for ISPs. I don't think there was ever a time when multicast was anything more than hardware vendors trying to profit off of ISPs with broken promises of efficiency.
Distributing servers to every ISP doesn't seem very efficient. It may work in the US where I you can count the number of ISPs on one hand, but where I live there are 100+.
> Multicast
Has multicast ever worked?