Subject: EXPRESS Evolution

From: Don Estberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 21:37:22 -0700

Hugh and David,

To what extent has your proposal for EXPRESS at SIGCOMM '99
encouraged/evolved into PIM-SO and PIM-SS, which are described in current
IETF drafts?  Also, since these drafts only deal with the part of the
EXPRESS proposal dealing with the simplification of multicast when there is
only one source, are there any efforts to define protocols that have the
other EXPRESS features such as subscriber counts and subscription?

I am Sr. Architect for Activate.net, which sells services for streaming
media distribution over the Internet; having multicast available over the
Internet would be of great benefit to us.  I'm asking the above questions
because last November I proposed giving a talk at the MultiMediaCom2000 in
June suggesting how multicast needed to change to make it more useful for
streaming media broadcasting; at that time I didn't know about your EXPRESS
proposal or the discussions at the November IETF meeting, but at a high
level I was proposing 80% of your objectives for EXPRESS.  Now I'm trying to
figure out how to give a talk at MultiMediaCom that will still express our
company's need for multicast to evolve, but take into account how much it
has evolved.  I'd appreciate any suggestions, or source documents that I am
not aware of.

Thanks
Don Estberg