I think that use case was implied by the OP:<p><i>With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast.</i><p>Multicast is effectively broadcast -- it&#x27;s (theoretically) great if what you&#x27;re distributing is a live video stream. But we&#x27;re moving toward a world where the vast majority of what we&#x27;re watching is on-demand. While I could be wrong about this, my strong suspicion is that the technology <i>hasn&#x27;t</i> gotten better in the last decade; most implementations just don&#x27;t scale to the level that a service like ESPN would require (i.e., millions of nodes reliably receiving HD video), and I&#x27;m not even sure most commercial Internet backbones support multicast.