BT Group execs points to ‘increasing migration to IP’ as driving factor behind MAUD

Source: BT

BT Group has pointed to the increasing migration to IP among viewers as a key driving factor behind the development of its latest technology innovation Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery.

Helen Burrows, Policy Director at BT, told DTVE that following the launch of the BT Sport app, it observed an increasing number of customers watching a live game via their mobile phone. The UK telco came to the conclusion with viewing habits changing drastically, the transition of viewing to an IP TV distribution model was inevitable.

“We started to think through, what are the challenges here and what are the demands going to be like. What we realised is that there’s normal viewing but that every now and then, you would get these moments of very popular must watch it live events,” said Burrows.

She explained MAUD was built in mind to equip for broadcast of content that incurs live traffic peaks such as live sport events like World Cup, the Olympics, as well as royal weddings.

“Those moments where 20 million people are watching something at the same time, they’re not that common. They might only come around once every four years. But when it does happen, especially when it’s sports, the reliability of that is really important,” she added.

The UK telco recently unveiled its latest technology development earlier in the month. MAUD uses multicast to group single streams into a shared stream. BT said it is designed to use up to 50% less bandwidth during peak events, reducing energy usage through the use of fewer caches.

The new technology which leverages both multicast and unicast sees overall content delivery enhanced including picture quality and connectivity.

Speaking to press, Maria Cuevas, networks research director at BT explained, “The CDN will direct you or any others to our network, we will request one copy of that content, which we will be able to distribute across the multicast tree. That then makes it different regions and into people’s home gateways which would then turn that back into unicast.”

MAUD was first announced to broadcasters at IBC 2023 in September. According to BT, broadcasters including the BBC, will be involved in evaluating and potentially trialling the technology to support a range of live content.

Elsewhere, commenting on the Ofcom’s recent revisions to net neutrality rules fornetwork operators, Howard Watson Chief technology & information officer at BT urged there still needs to be more regulation on other content provider who decides to flood BT’s network.

“We welcome that progress, we do think it hasn’t quite gone far enough,” he said. It’s gone as far as Ofcom can go. But we do think that the investment that we’re making now and we’ll need to make over the course, certainly as we see broadcast TV becoming IP, by 2030, we do need to be able to prioritise that in the right places.”