Can Multicast Level Up Live Sports Streaming to Parity With Broadcast?
Live sports streaming offers offers unparalleled potential for interactivity and personalization, but for peak events like Netflix’s Tyson-Paul fight (or just outside the sports world, this year’s Oscars), reliability lapses in mass-scale streams, even when proportionately low, reinforce the perception (and to some degree the reality) that reaching “it just works” parity with broadcast remains an elusive goal. Is multicast the solution to all of live sports streaming’s problems? How broadly applicable is it across different streaming applications? And can it be secured? YouTube’s Sean McCarthy, Akamai’s Will Law, EZDRM’s Olga Kornienko, TATA’s Tom Buffolano, and SVTA’s Jason Thibeault discuss in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2025.
'It's Different for Television'
Taking the long view, Thibeault kicks off the conversation with a pointed question directed first at TATA's Buffolano: "This is something we've talked about in this industry for 30 years. Multicast, the nasty M word. Would multicast enable live sports streaming to reach broadcast like scalability? How would it affect this five nines challenge that we're talking about?"
"I think the short answer to that question is probably 'yes,'" Buffolano affirms. But he cautions that it takes a significant amount of dedicated resources "to get all of the advantages of what a multicast can do for you."
"Everyone thinks multicast is a magic panacea because you see it work for television," says Akamai's Will Law. "And you think, 'Well, surely that will work for the web, right? That's how you deliver the same content to everyone at the same time.' But it's different for television. You have an assured quality of service, which is your broadcast in the air signal. So you're not having to adapt anything. And every receiver in the United States is ATSC 1 or ATSC 3-compliant. So you have one device type, essentially, that you're serving to."
Law goes on to argue that "multicast is a terrible solution for everything that's not a live sporting event, which is all the different movies we like to watch different movies on a Tuesday. So ideally, yes, a multicast-like solution would be key during a peak event, but then it's not optimal at any other time."
Law suggests, with more than a little skepticism, that one solution might be to "build two networks," but "use one for only four hours during a live event." More practically, he continues, "the economic suggests that you should build one network that can try to do both. At Akamai, we've had a multicast product now for eight years. I don't think most people even know it exists," he concedes, laughing. "Come and buy it from us! We would love you! We support it. It's used mostly in Central and South America."
And then it all comes back to network compliance and playback device concerns that impact streaming to a much greater degree than OTA. "Multicast requires that you can multicast into the networks. The network you're distributing through has to be multicast-compliant, which is not true of many of the networks today. And it even converts from adaptive media into multicast and back again at the other end, which is the other problem because your phone is not receiving the multicast signal. So you have this endpoint problem and termination problem of multicast."
Law goes on to acknowledge that these are primarily "terrestrial multicast" challenges, and that cellular multicast (eMBMS) is available for 5G and not similarly burdened. But it's also "not used at scale for live events today... So we have multicast opportunities, but they don't deliver the immediate benefits that many people historically associate with television."
Is It Safe?
Security and anti-piracy always key concerns for premium live sports events, and any technology that opens the doors to gate-crashers is likely to raise major red flags. "I'm going to put on my security hat and ask you if you can secure a multicast stream?" asks EZDRM COO & Co-Founder Olga Kornienki. "And the answer is, not really to the extent that live sporting events would like," given the soaring cost of premium sports licensing rights and the fortunes that brands habitually shell out for Super Bowl ads.
"If we had to deliver it in an unsecure fashion, that's easily piratable, I don't know if we could actually run it as a business overall. Regardless of what the technology can do or not, would the business side allow it to even happen?"
Multicast and Managing the End-User Experience
Another challenge that comes into play when delivering live sports via streaming is evaluating the end-user experience, which YouTube Head of OTT Live Engineering Sean McCarthy says finds streamers holding themselves to a higher standard since they get have more data on that experience than those delivering content with "traditional broadcast or anything over the air."
Indeed, with OTA, he maintains, "You don't get the telemetry back from the devices to know how it actually looks on the screen and what the end user experience is. So you assume it's better, and it probably, is given the standardization. But in the streaming world," he continues, "we can see every rebuffer session. So we're holding ourselves to a higher standard in that regard."
How does this quality-of-experience concern play into the arguments made for multicast as the solution for peak events?
"There's always going to be the next catalyst for [people saying], 'Oh, this will require multicast to scale.' Maybe it's the Super Bowl or the Jake Paul fight. Or one thing that came up a couple years ago that actually seriously had us considering multicast was the advent of proxy services like Apple Private Relay. We thought that these would really degrade the quality of the streams, and the reality of it is they didn't. At the scale at which we were growing, it just hasn't been necessary to really take that brute force approach to changing the streaming workflow from a unicast solution to multicast. Personally, I think Media Over QUIC makes a lot more sense. But I haven't seen the need for it yet in any of our applications."
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