The Tonto broadband multicast is a cooperative endeavor of the North Dakota State University Archaeology Technologies Lab (ATL) and Archaeological Legacy Institute.

Tonto Multicast Schedule - Greenwich Mean Time
     3:00 AM, 10:00 AM, 7:00 PM

Tonto Multicast Schedule - US Central Time
     5:00 AM, 2:00 PM, 10:00 PM (During Daylight Savings)
     4:00 AM, 1:00 PM, 9:00 PM (Otherwise)

The multicast is in RealMedia format. You need to have RealMedia Player installed on your computer to view it. Visit our plug-ins page for information on how to download RealMedia Player.

You must also be connected to the Internet via a multicast-enabled, broadband connection. To find out if you are on a multicast-enabled network, contact your internet service provider.

Click to Visit The Multicast Page

The ATL is located on the North Dakota State University campus, an Internet2 (I2) institution. As such, the ATL has access to approximately 45 megabits of I2 bandwidth. The ATL operates several I2 servers that maintain the capability of broadcasting digital video in multicast mode as well as delivering other large capacity multimedia.

Multicast is a form of Internet media broadcasting that differs in important ways from standard on-demand streaming.

On-Demand Streaming involves a two-way “conversation” between the end-user’s computer and the media file server. This type of communication requires close, real-time coordination between the two ends of the relationship and occupies large amounts of Internet bandwidth as well as lots of computer power (RAM and microprocessor capacity) at the server end. This could be referred to as “unicasting” because it uses a separate data stream for each member of the audience.

Multicast is a one-way scheduled broadcast of data from the media server to the end-user via an intervening user network node. Multicasting sends out only one data stream to the routers, which replicate it and send it on to the audience. It therefore takes much less Internet bandwidth (because end-users do not send data to the media server) and much less computer power for the media server (because no coordination and exchange of data is required with the end-user computers).

Thus, multicast is similar to standard radio and television broadcasting in that the programs are scheduled and sent one way to the user community. Because the programs are digitally encoded rather than analog (as in radio and most TV), however, the potential quality of the sound and images is very high, depending on the capacity of the system delivering the data and the bandwidth at which the program file is encoded. The digital format also permits the delivery of multimedia programming (both moving and still images, sound and text) such as is commonplace on The Archaeology Channel.

Our First Program, the Tonto video, has been encoded at a bandwidth of 1 Mb/sec, which is much higher than standard broadband streaming video, allowing end-users to experience the program full-screen and full-motion (that is, 30 frames/sec) and with video and audio quality comparable to standard TV. In time, multicast quality could equal or even exceed the standards of HDTV, but this future awaits the creation of a much more robust Internet delivery infrastructure and proliferation of computer hardware with the capacity to take advantage of it. Our multicast project is an experiment intended to explore the issues associated with, and to prepare for, this development.

Tonto Multicast Schedule - Greenwich Mean Time
     3:00 AM, 10:00 AM, 7:00 PM

Tonto Multicast Schedule - US Central Time
     5:00 AM, 2:00 PM, 10:00 PM (During Daylight Savings)
     4:00 AM, 1:00 PM, 9:00 PM (Otherwise)

Click to Visit The Multicast Page