I've gotten up at 2 or 3 plenaries and asked just who we were
multicasting to. I haven't been able to watch IETF on multicast in over
4 years. It's been that long since I've had access to a site which had
multicast enabled. The "broadband" world isn't enabled for multicast.
I've got plenty of bandwidth available, but since there's no way to
attach to the multicast world, it just doesn't matter.
I've also offered MANY times to pay a remote attendance fee to cover the
cost of using one of the technologies presently widely used on the
Internet. I wasn't able to make it to San Diego, but could have
participated remotely if I'd have been able to get the video and perhaps
had a way to fire questions into the rooms (email, IRC, etc.).
While I know the folks who do all the camera work and such spend a lot
of effort doing it, I'm not sure that effort is worth it. I was able to
watch the San Diego plenary via RealVideo some time after the event. If
that's the only use, though, we could just have folks taping (in ALL
rooms) and later upload that footage.
Feeding a video stream out from each room to one of the CDN companies
would seem quite workable. When not on-site for meetings, I'd be happy
to contribute the same fee as is paid for cookies and danish, only have
that money go to the video distribution effort.
Bottom line: either reformulate this aspect of the meetings to make it
more usable, or make the video available after the fact only.
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Daniel Senie dts(_at_)senie(_dot_)com
Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranth.com