Whether it is live sport, in particular Premier League and international football, or live music such as Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which set new records for mobile data used during a standalone concert, the appetite for live content among UK online users is huge, causing strain on networks, and leading UK telco BT has reported that its response to this demand – Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD) – has now seen its first test deployment.
Developed in collaboration with Broadpeak, MAUD is designed to enhance live video streaming quality and reliability for viewers and increase content delivery efficiency for broadcasters and content delivery networks (CDNs) by flattening peaks of network traffic by switching to multicast delivery, which is a more efficient way of delivering content over the internet.
The technology aims to improve the efficiency of the complex network journey that content takes to reach viewers and enhance the viewing experience. It is regarded as a key solution to how BT Group, or indeed any other internet service provider, can manage ever-increasing traffic loads.
MAUD was announced in December 2023 on the back of BT Group revealing that its networks had come under severe strain after the simultaneous online broadcast of six Premier League football matches and downloads of popular games. Unlike traditional unicast delivery, MAUD technology uses multicast to group single streams into one shared stream. A further advantage over “ordinary” multicast streams, according to BT, is that its integration is made completely transparent to the player application, which means content service providers don’t need to modify their customer apps to take advantage of the technology.
The company added that removing the need to select and serve millions of individual streams to viewers increases the efficiency of content delivery and reduces the environmental impact and overall costs for broadcasters, internet providers and CDNs. This provides dedicated delivery for streaming TV over the internet, allowing the delivery of live content at a higher quality, with content less likely to be impacted by other internet traffic, such as large file downloads.
Enhanced content delivery efficiency from MAUD is also attributed with having the potential to yield cost savings for CDN operators as they can achieve “seamless” scalability without needing to expand hardware caches. MAUD technology is said to use up to 50% less bandwidth during peak events, reducing energy consumption through the use of fewer caches.
BT Group has now taken MAUD technology from proof of concept to real-world application in its first live CDN deployment in the trial with CDN firm Edgio. The trial used BBC Two content on the EE set-top box TV platform in the live network – taking the technology from proof of concept to real world.
The trial is said to have shown that during peak times on the network, the MAUD solution converted over 60% of traffic from unicast delivery to multicast delivery, demonstrating the promised ability to flatten peaks of network traffic. Moving to the next stage of the trial, BT Group is looking to broaden the scope to include more channels, build out the full feature set and test the addition of dynamic advert insertion, which would enable a seamless, personalised ad experience for viewers.
Chris Bramley, managing director, NAS and architecture, networks, at BT, said it was delighted with the result of the trial. “Without doubt, the demand for live content will continue and innovation will be part of the answer to deliver faster streaming, of higher quality content, to an even greater number of devices,” he said. “As millions look forward to watching the next live event, we’ll continue to innovate and collaborate with content and application providers, on technologies such as MAUD, to make sure we collectively deliver the best experiences for our shared customers.”
