Week Five - Group 3 (our group) Presentation

This was the week of our presentation. Because I get nervous, whilst infront of people, the rest of my group, Becky, Helen and Jon, gave me the least to say, which I was very appreciative of. We had alot of problems with our presentation, because we couldn't get to grips with our chosen topic. When we originally chose the topic, we thought it would be pretty straight forward. But little did we know that Mutlicasting and Unicasting are a FORM of Webcasting. We thought they were 3 separate things, but this made matters more confusing. Because we struggled to find information on each of the three, and finally get our heads round what each term meant, it meant that the preparation for the presentation took longer than we expected it to. We learnt that multicast server is a one-to-many server, and where the clients/users wanting to watch the content must connect to that stream to view it. This connection requires little bandwidth. In Unicasting, the server is a one-to-one connection, so each user has to have its own connection, meaning that a large network connection is required, and the bandwidth used is very high. Unicasting is the typical method at the moment, but many services like the BBC, are transferring to Multicasting. In conjunction with group 1's presentation, this added to my point of it is better to stream content online using webcasting, rather than spending alot of money and time on filming with a normal broadcast. I have learnt that webcasting has a good future.