The methodical presentation deals with the key questions in turn: from the mechanics of multicast protocols to current state-of-the-art designs, and from methods of theoretical analysis of these protocols to applying them in the ns2 network simulator, known for being hard to extend. The authors' years of research in the field inform this thorough treatment, which covers details such as applying AOM (application-oriented multicast) protocol to IPTV provision and resolving the practical design issues thrown up in creating scalable AOM multicast service models.