Overlay networks have become popular in recent times for content distribution and end-system multicasting of media streams. In the latter case, the motivation is based on the lack of widespread deployment of IP multicast and the ability to perform end-host processing. However, constructing routes between various end-hosts, so that data can be streamed from content publishers to many thousands of subscribers is still a challenging problem. First, any routes between end-hosts using trees built on top of overlay networks can increase stress on the underlying physical network, due to multiple instances of the same data traversing a given physical link. Second, because overlay routes between endhosts may traverse physical network links more than once, they increase the end-to-end latency compared to IP-level routing. Third, algorithms for constructing efficient, largescale trees that reduce link stress and latency are typically more complex. This paper therefore compares various methods t...