Multicasting from the archives

Me, 5-Mar-99: ``Multicasting. It's close. And it is going to revolutionize internet radio.``

Man, I got that one wrong! Multicasting never caught on, not because the technology was bad but because there were never any business reasons for ISPs to enable multicast support in their backbone routers... there was no financial incentive for ISPs to support it; rather it was something that would ultimately cost them money to support it, and there was no way for them to effectively get paid for carrying the multicast traffic on their networks.

There was (and still is) no settlement model, hence no business incentive for multicasting. That's the main reason it never took off.