I found the multicast registery here.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/multicast-addresses/multicast-addresses.xhtml

I already knew that addresses between 224.0.0.1 and 239.255.255.255 are reserved by multicast.

Obviously multicast could be immensely useful if used by the general public, it would obsolete much of facebook, youtube, nearly all CDNs (content delivery networks), would kill cloudflare and company’s business model and just re-arrange the internet with far reaching social implication.

So, why hasn’t all these multicast addresses been converted in usable private IPv4 unicast address space ?

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlOP
    01·
    2 months ago

    It’s not “video-on-demand”, you don’t subscribe to a file but to an address, the multicaster sends the file or stream or message when they’re ready, you receive them if you’re listening, everyone subscribed gets the same series of packets. It’s the only benefit that multicast really has over unicast, the sender just sends the packet once. There’s no server, no caching, no repeats. Direct from you to them and it can work for everything.