scte PRESENTS participants, even those who considered themselves “good with tech”, became visibly anxious navigating today’s app- driven smart TV home screens. They struggled with scrolling menus, branded tiles and ad-led UIs. Confidence collapsed further when they were asked to find content via an app and collapsed again when asked to use on-screen text search. By contrast, giving them a remote and letting them press “1” to get BBC One immediately calmed them. Lindsay-Davies argued that if you remove the simplicity of channel numbers and familiar navigation, you will strand part of the audience. Voice search was highlighted as a surprising win: once a participant accidentally triggered microphone input and spoke naturally, their frustration dropped. Xavier LeClercq of Broadpeak focused on capacity. His argument was that IP can absolutely deliver “TV-grade” live events – but only if networks are engineered like motorways on race day, not like city streets at rush hour. He illustrated this using live sport. In India, the IPL cricket now peaks at around 55 million concurrent streaming users, which equates to roughly 100 terabits per second of traffic. That’s already beyond what a typical national network in the UK could comfortably absorb today. And yet even that is still only a fraction of total IPL viewing, the networks saved before the boundary by the amount of mobile viewing to the contest, with broadcast TV still catching an audience of more than 160 million.
premium live events. DAZN was allowed to ride this path too when it acquired top-tier football rights in Italy, giving OTT sports a broadcast-like quality of experience. LeClercq was asked what would happen in a geopolitical shock should UKTV become fully dependent on global CDNs and global cloud networks? He replied that broadcasters in places like Norway are already asking for sovereign delivery: the ability to keep serving video to their own citizens even if the country were, in effect, cut off from the wider internet. The implication is more national or operator- owned distribution infrastructure, not less.
To handle this kind of volume, Indian operator Reliance built its own CDN inside its network, rather than relying entirely on global third-party CDNs. The goal is to localise traffic flows, cut transit cost and avoid choke points. LeClercq described a second model: multicast ABR (adaptive bitrate). Instead of sending a unique unicast stream to each viewer, the operator uses IP multicast in the core of the network to move one version of the channel efficiently, then converts it back into individual unicast streams inside the home.
Telecom Italia uses this approach to keep latency and buffering down during
TV to IP - The Capacity Challenge Panel 2: Technical: Spreading the load
deduplicating popular traffic deep in the access network. BT is also preparing for low latency at scale. In an IBC Accelerator using L3D DASH, segment request instances fell to around 120ms, a big shift from the 2-10s segment world that stresses CDNs and control loops. Finally, BT is aligning QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) congestion signals with ABR ladders to deliver paced, less “spiky” throughput, smoothing the ride when multiple congestion controls (transport, player, even appliance-level) collide.
in UHD) produces a working peak-load assumption of approximately 375tbps nationally – a “monster” that Stevens says must be tamed, financially and ecologically. BT’s main bet is MAUD (multicast- assisted unicast delivery), developed in partnership with Broadpeak. Without changing the player, a lightweight CDN- to-CDN and publisher integration swaps the heavy segment payload onto multicast while keeping HTTP header transactions unicast. An edge proxy in the home gateway stitches headers and payload,
Could football break the internet? Not if you have enough terabytes.
BT’s Andy Stevens opened the technical
panel with a reality check: as viewing migrates from DTT to OTT, network
peaks will grow sharper and taller. BT has tracked six years of broadband usage and sees clear football-driven traffic spikes when matches are streamed and troughs when they’re on terrestrial channels. Extrapolating a full slate of popular linear channels (assumed to be
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
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