How Blockcast Works
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CDNs pool bandwidth from points of presence (PoPs) worldwide and contract out their ingress (bandwidth into an on-network ISP) and egress (bandwidth to other networks). While CDNs are distributed networks by definition, they have a single owner, so getting coverage of PoPs deeper in networks and closer to end user is challenging for the following reasons:
Capital costs of deploying many nodes
Lack of financial incentives to operate nodes for resources provided
Bottlenecks on ingress to fill caches where there is no fiber
Confidentiality of user data and node operation in untrusted environment
Blockcast enables existing and new CDNs to operate as pools, with a permissionless control plane. It incentivizes node operators to bring and deploy their own hardware and contribute their resources.
Additionally, Blockcast automatically converts unicast requests into multicast between nodes, enabling downstream PoPs to share the same ingress bandwidth resources carrying popular content. RELAY nodes work with CAST nodes to expand the coverage of multicast data services to ISPs that don't peer them.
This allows the services to be run over bandwidth-constrained networks, including satellite or cellular networks. With nodes that can be run anywhere, with the scalability of television broadcasts, everyone enjoys much better latency, faster download speeds, and lower data costs.