A little Blue Sky thinking here, based on one simple premise, when did you last watch a webcast for a major event that wasn't jerky, partially inaudible, and/or had the connection drop out?
Maybe I'm unlucky, but I've sat on the end of very fat pipes with great connectivity and still had this miserable experience. If TV was like this it would never have reached the general public.
Multicast a la the Mbone is one way around this problem, but it seems to have become an historical curiousity.
The main problem with webcasts are the use of a single point of distribution to many players. At the end of the day a single point can only distribute to a finite number of players, bandwidth and processor cycles dictate this. Unless one were to reserve near-infinite resources at an exorbitant cost one could not guarantee that the servers would not be overwhelmed.
However, another - perhaps brute force but simpler in some ways - approach would be for multimedia players to effectively place a near zero impedence load on the distribution of a signal, for each player to try to pass on at least as much as it received, similar in a way to any of the peer to peer networks. It sounds trivial, and I know the implementation won't be quite so simple, but given the choice between a watchable webcast delayed by 45 seconds and one you can't connect to, which would you take?
I know that a number of people are working on solutions like this, and conversely there are vested interests and inertia towards maintaining the status quo, but it's something to bear in mind next time you try to connect to and try to watch an important webcast.
