First announced in December 2023, BT Group’s Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD) technology aims to improve viewer experiences and increase the efficiency of the journey that content takes to reach them.
BT teamed up with Broadpeak to integrate the company’s nanoCDN multicast ABR (mABR) in its consumer smart hub routers, leveraging multicast capabilities to group individual streams together in the network core, before converting them back to unicast at the edge for consumption by player applications on end-user devices.
The company has also worked with Qwilt to deploy the MAUD solution with its Open Edge technology.
Now, BT Group has revealed the first trial of the solution which involved using BBC Two content on EE’s set-top box TV platform in the live network, which the company said takes the technology from proof of concept to real-world.
According to a blog post by Chris Bramley, managing director, NAS and architecture, Networks, at BT, the trial revealed that during peak times on the network, the MAUD solution converted over 60 per cent of traffic from unicast delivery to multicast delivery.
In simpler terms, the trial has demonstrated MAUD’s ability to flatten peaks of network traffic, by switching to multicast delivery, thus delivering content via the internet in a more efficient way.
The company is now working to broaden MAUD’s scope to include more channels, build out the full feature set, and test the addition of dynamic ad insertion, added Bramley.
