Built to Scale? Why Live Sports Need Multicast ABR and a Video-Specialized CDN
As streaming giants like Apple and Amazon Prime Video compete fiercely for live sports rights, the industry is confronting a new reality: is widespread streaming delivery infrastructure fully prepared to enable peak-audience streaming, at global scale? Last year, we asked the question on whether more robust streaming delivery technologies could have prevented the viewer experience issues in the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight, serving as a vivid reminder that even the biggest platforms face major hurdles when trying to deliver live events at immense scale.
Live streaming is rapidly emerging as the primary destination for major sports events, but not without significant challenges. For sports streamers, three imperatives are emerging as critical priorities: scale more efficiently, reduce operational and environmental costs, and secure content against piracy. All while giving fans the high-quality experiences they demand from investing in multiple premium subscriptions.
Multicast ABR: A Logical Future for Live Sports Streaming
Live events cause massive spikes in audience numbers that can easily overwhelm standard streaming infrastructures. When millions tune in at once, most unicast delivery systems send separate streams to each device, which is a highly inefficient method that drives network traffic, costs, and can risk both viewer experience and streaming profitability.
Multicast ABR changes the game. Rather than duplicating streams for every viewer, m-ABR enables a single stream to be distributed simultaneously to millions of viewers, across any screen or device. It retains the personalization benefits of OTT while drastically reducing network load - a critical advantage for scalability and economics. The success stories speak for themselves. Providers like DAZN and Orange have reported up to 90% reductions in traffic and cost during high-demand events, along with improved quality of experience.
Implementing m-ABR requires a collaborative mindset and willingness to innovate beyond just what feels like a ‘quick-fix’ solution. When faced with traffic spikes, many content providers default to requesting more capacity from their general purpose CDN or delivery partner. While this can provide short-term relief, it drives up costs and fails to resolve the underlying inefficiencies in how content is distributed. A more effective strategy is to design for efficiency from the ground up with m-ABR at the core. That means teaming up with internet service providers (ISP) that are m-ABR ready. Top ISPs that we work with see the dual benefit of equipping their infrastructure with m-ABR. They become more attractive partners for high-volume streamers, while managing network costs and energy requirements. And if you’re a content owner, smart partnerships built around m-ABR unlock a far more scalable, cost-efficient way to deliver premium experiences with maximum ROI on live event rights.
Optimizing Infrastructure Efficiency
Content providers often over-provision their infrastructure to accommodate peak traffic, leaving servers running idle for much of the time. This leads to significant energy waste and mounting operational costs. In fact, idle servers can consume up to 80% of the power used when fully active. Rather than building for maximum load at all times, a smarter approach is to scale resources dynamically, minimizing hardware usage and reducing environmental impact through open caching and higher performance CDN solutions.
A strong example of this approach in action is our collaboration on sustainable live streaming with the TM Forum Catalyst initiative, alongside global operators including TF1, Rai, and Bouygues Telecom, which demonstrated that smarter delivery models can deliver energy savings of 80–90%. Although these fantastic collaboration initiatives and sustainability proof of concepts showcase new models that are proven to deliver results, we still see shortcomings in decisive action taken by the industry. Content providers should implement closer monitoring to track internal power usage as well as their networks and vendors, while aligning fragmented teams, often divided between cost control and sustainability, around common objectives. For forward-thinking organizations, those objectives should be converging around the conviction that a more sustainable approach can be directly tied to financial benefit.
Deeper Anti-Piracy Measures – Inside the CDN
Recent trends show a sharp resurgence in online piracy, particularly through unauthorized streaming platforms. Younger audiences are especially active, with 2024 data showing that one in four people in Sweden reported pirating content, with the highest rates among 15 to 24-year-olds. The financial stakes are equally significant, Parks Associates estimates piracy could cost the media industry over $113 billion by 2027 in the US alone.
Anti-piracy technology has become a top investment priority for major streaming platforms. There’s increasing demand for deeply integrated security measures built directly into the streaming workflow, enabling real-time detection and disruption of illegal activity. These go well beyond watermarking or delayed takedown requests. Effective solutions leverage behavioral analysis to identify token abuse, automatically block suspicious IP addresses, and detect anomalies in viewing patterns. When deployed at the system level within a video-specialized CDN, these tools can disable pirate streams before they scale.
The uncomfortable reality is that piracy-driven traffic can actually inflate revenues for some traditional CDN providers, whose income streams are directly tied to bandwidth consumption. That’s why multi-layered security, natively embedded within a video-first CDN is becoming a more popular choice for streaming providers.
Want to Scale? Check Your Performance
The convergence of rising expectations, rights costs, and increasing technical complexity means the status quo in sports streaming won’t be viable for much longer. Large platforms must transition from unicast-first, general purpose capacity planning to a smarter model that protects viewer experiences – and your bottom line.
Technologies like m-ABR are not silver bullets but essential building blocks for the next generation of streaming architecture. Paired with energy-efficient delivery strategies and real-time security, they form a foundation for scalable, resilient, and profitable live sports streaming.
So, if you’re investing in new premier sports rights, or partnering up with new delivery partners, ask the hard questions. Is your network really optimized for scale? Can you harness m-ABR for real cost savings and quality of experience improvements? Those with the right answers will be well-placed for success in a new era of live streaming.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Broadpeak. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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