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Cisco Small Business 300 Series Managed Switch Administration Guide 236
Multicast
This section describes the Multicast Forwarding feature, and covers the following
topics:
Multicast Forwarding
Defining Multicast Properties
Adding MAC Group Address
Adding IP Multicast Group Addresses
Configuring IGMP Snooping
MLD Snooping
Querying IGMP/MLD IP Multicast Group
Defining Multicast Router Ports
Defining Forward All Multicast
Defining Unregistered Multicast Settings

Multicast Forwarding

Multicast forwarding enables one-to-many information dissemination. Multicast
applications are useful for dissemination of information to multiple clients, where
clients do not require reception of the entire content. A typical application is a
cable-TV-like service, where clients can join a channel in the middle of a
transmission, and leave before it ends.
The data is sent only to relevant ports. Forwarding the data only to the relevant
ports conserves bandwidth and host resources on links.