Sky’s principal CDN architect Iuniana Oprescu cautioned there’s no one- size-fits-all fix. Sky will “do more of what works” by
going deeper on multi-CDN, spread very large live loads across more players, and collaborate earlier on event forecasts. Oprescu is sceptical that multicast is economical for Sky today given device diversity and the need for industry-wide adoption. Perhaps unusually for Sky, Oprescu doesn’t just point to football, but also Amazon, Netflix and game downloads as being behind network peaks. Hardware is racing ahead, but “terabits in a rack” scares operators: when a super- dense node fails, redistribution hurts. Oprescu also highlighted UDP-based approaches that don’t play by TCP’s congestion rules; they’re a rounding error now, but at 80-90% of traffic would create network fairness headaches. She sees scope for AI-assisted encoding efficiency and, bigger picture, insists the job is to be invisible: make TV “feel like home”, ergonomic and joyful – technology under the hood, not in the way.
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Justin Gupta put the economics in context. As Head of Broadcast & Video Ads, EMEA at Google, he said COVID
took digital adoption forward by four years; linear ad revenue has slid while IP revenues have grown. Some UK broadcasters, such as Channel 4, are tracking towards digital-first by 2030. Broadcasters are also chasing younger audiences on YouTube, monetising there and pulling some back to their own streamers. But scale bites: DAZN’s FIFA Club World Cup hit 7.66 million concurrent streams with one-to-one addressable ads – and remaining feasible up to 10 million, but beyond that cohort- based tactics and multi-CDN offload are required. Gupta’s three questions for full IP were: 1. How to broadcast efficiently at scale (multicast-assist, shared caches); 2. How to digitise legacy platforms without leaving viewers behind (DVBI-style discovery could blend IP channels with broadcast UIs); and 3. What great ad experiences look like (beyond pre-rolls to L-shapes, PiP, shoppable flows) while keeping quality high.
Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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