With the growth
of usage of multimedia services within CARNet community we
witnessed increased load on our media distribution systems
(Media on Demand multimedia servers) and have reached performance
limits of our currently used distribution mechanisms (unicast
publishing points and on-demand delivery). To avoid this limitations,
and with the intention of providing 24/7 Internet TV and Internet
Radio programs (and branding it as "CARNet TV")
we were forced to seek new solution for multimedia content-delivery.
With the usage of Windows Media Multicast Stations we are
able to solve most of those issues, providing friendlier interface
to our multimedia services and also reducing network and server
performance requrements. Our motivation and experiences with
Windows Media Multicast Stations are further discussed within
this paper.