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BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

SPORTSLJM — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 09:32:39 GMT

https://newsroom.bt.com/bt-group-announces-live-tv-technology-breakthrough-to-meet-growing-customer-demand/

Hello guys, hoping some of you better technically minded than me might be able to elaborate on the benefits of BTs Multicast Assisted Unicast Delivery technology (that was a mouthful!).

As a paying Sports TV subscriber (both BT and Sky), I’ve tried pretty much all formats now- satellite, sky stream, and BT app. The sports lag between satellite and sky stream at about 30 seconds, BT multicast down to around 10.

Some of the 4K Sports quality is now superb on streaming and clearly it appears to be where the future is.

Im trying to understand with this BT announcement- are we essentially saying that BT have created something whereby all providers could have a multicast (one stream) sent to their subscribers, without the need to be a BT internet customer? And as a result, would all content providers live streaming lag reduce substantially to something similar to what BT TV multicast currently achieves?

Doss anyone know whether they’ve trialled and teamed up with Sky yet? I know they’ve worked with the BBC but would love to know who else is partnering in the trials.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

Crimliar — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 13:40:14 GMT

Based on what I understand, I could be so wrong on this! The idea is to bunch multiple live streams into a single fat multicast bundle as they traverse the super-highways of the internet, giving them priority and preferential routing as they go. These fat bundles are only stripped back into unicast streams at the nearest location to the end user which makes sense (or it would clog our puny gigabit and lower connections at this point).
It's not a totally new concept, BT, Virgin, and some of their content partners have been using a "lite" version of this for years.
It's a big thing (reducing overall latency and sheer quantity of data traversing the internet), that hopefully while working properly you, as a user, will never notice!

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 21:12:11 GMT

@SPORTSLJM

Based on my limited understanding, MAUD enables the benefits of Multicast transmission (low latency etc.), but can present the stream in a device agnostic way.

So it doesn’t matter if you have an EE TV Pro box (Multicast) or a Fire TV stick (Unicast), the apps on the devices get the stream they need at the point of delivery.

I suspect Sky are involved in some way and Sky Stream does have ‘low latency’ sports streams up in the 900 channel range (HD and UHD), but I cannot say with any certainty if that is related to MAUD or a separate trial.

There are a few BT/EE employees on the forum who may know more, but whether they can tell you anything or not is another matter! 😁

On the 4K sports streams, I have a feeling in my water that either this year or next, we will finally see Sky Sports in UHD via BT/EE.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

zulu17 — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 23:10:54 GMT

There was as linkup announced in March

https://broadpeak.tv/newsroom/bt-group-and-broadpeak-partner-on-new-multicast-technology-maud/

this states

A number of major broadcasters and content companies are expected to trial this breakthrough solution in 2024.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

DarrenDev — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 09:59:19 GMT

The benefits of MAUD to the user will be minimal - in fact, the ideal scenario would be that they see no difference whatsoever.

The live streams you see in apps at the moment are serving small chunks of video specifically to each client. So if you have 2 devices in the house each watching a 5Mbps stream, you're using 10Mbps of your bandwidth. If 10 people in your street are watching the same, then that's 100Mbps of bandwidth to your cabinet that is being used. Multiply that by the entire country (e.g. when Freely launches), and we'll have an internet that cannot cope with us all streaming at the same time.

The purpose of MAUD is to use Multicast to deliver those streams all the way to your home as a single stream, and then have them split to your devices by your router. So that 5Mbps stream is being sent across the entire UK network and only using 5Mbps, but then the router in your home converts that Multicast back into the segments that your device asked for.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

Brucemeister5 — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 10:47:43 GMT

@Anonymous I’m not so sure that I share your confidence about 4K Sky Sports coming to EETV anymore. When Sky got BT Sport/TNT Sports Ultimate I expected that there would be a reciprocal agreement, but didn’t anticipate that TNT Sports Ultimate was going to be made available at no extra cost via Discovery+.

There has been talk of Sky Sports Light being launched in the not too distant future via a survey of selected Sky & NOW customers which has been mentioned on another forum. It would include all of the Sky Sports channels except Premier League & F1 ( and would also need to exclude Main Event to my mind, although it doesn’t state this) It would cost £15pm and be available on Sky, Virgin & NOW. I’m not sure whether this would include EETV customers. This deal does look to be too good to be true for those who would simply downgrade to Sky Sports Light during the summer to watch the cricket.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

SPORTSLJM — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 10:53:23 GMT

@DarrenDev

Thanks Darren, makes sense.

Ive seen this week on Sky Stream there are two sky sports low latency test channels at the moment.

Channels 921 and 922 are trialling a HD and UHD version of Sky Sports main event I think.

Quick latency tests seem to show these as being around/upto 20 seconds ahead of the usual stream channel content. As the regular streams are approx 30 seconds behind the satellite feee, it looks as if the Sky Stream latency could therefore be reduced to just 10 seconds, which I believe is somewhere in line with BTs multi cast offering.

Does this mean Sky are trialling some sort of multicast delivery here that is reducing the latency? Obviously the key difference with Sky Stream is they are providing it to customers with a whole range of different internet providers as opposed to BT Multicast which is only BT internet- is this where MAUD comes in, in the sense that Sky are sending the multicast stream to all customers, then the individual ISP is decoding it into the unicast output?

Forgive my technical ignorance on this- I’m just keen to understand it and more than anything, I want Streamed TV providers to improve- especially latency!

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

DarrenDev — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:01:14 GMT

The latency you see on streams at the moment isn't due to how long the data takes to download - that's only milliseconds.
The latency is in the encoding and packaging of that video into an ABR stream - i.e. splitting that stream into multiple different quality levels.

Low latency is a different way of packaging the video. It requires a server and client that support it, and (from memory) I believe it's more expensive to do.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:06:28 GMT

@Brucemeister5

Fair enough.

I only watch Sky Sports for Premier League and F1! 🤣

To be honest, I'm done with EE TV at the end of this current contract, so it doesn't really matter if it arrives or not any longer to me.

There are just too many compromises for us. I'll likely retain the broadband as that has been solid, and to get discounted access to Discovery+ Premium, but that is it.

Weirdly, it was explaining the foibles of the TV service over on the EE community that pushed me over the edge!

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:55:27 GMT

Surely a huge stumbling block would be the number of non-BT routers that don't support multicast? I'm not sure that could be easily added in firmware, given the number of major brands that currently don't support it.

There's also the issues we see in these forums with Openreach infrastructure blocking multicast or it failing for "reasons". At the moment, as long as you have a connection then everything bar content via the BT EPG just works. If everything is multicast then the points of potential failure are multiplied significantly.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

SPORTSLJM — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 10:58:21 GMT

@DarrenDev if this is the case that it’s the encoding etc that takes the time or causes the delay in delivery to screen, how does BTs multicast manage to deliver their TV product within around 8-10seconds of Satellite compared to other stream tv options?

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

DarrenDev — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 11:28:39 GMT

There's no repackaging for multicast - it's video stream direct to video stream. ABR means chopping the video into segments (between 2 and 6 seconds long), encoding at multiple quality levels and multiple formats, DRM protecting each chunk, and adding to the manifest. Clients then load/refresh that manifest every few seconds and wait until there are sufficient chunks to play seamlessly. e.g. some clients would be capable of playing nearer to the live point, but they choose to stay a few seconds behind so that they can offer smooth playback if any segments are delayed. If a segment was requested just as the connection briefly dropped, it'd take a couple of seconds to timeout, and then the client needs to request the next level down ... if the player was at the live point, you'd see buffering. By intentionally being slightly behind, it can show the lower quality briefly and then go back up when it's proven the connection is stable again.
With multicast, none of this happens - the bandwidth is guaranteed, so there's only a single quality available. Delivery is also marked top priority over the network, so if data is dropped the picture breaks up briefly and then resumes when it can.

A massive over-simplification, but hopefully enough to illustrate the difference.

Google for low latency ABR to find a few articles out there about what it offers.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

naylor2006 — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 12:31:43 GMT

@DarrenDev so how does this breakthrough differ from the existing Multicast service hitting my EE/BT TV Box Pro? Is it a different type of multicast pointing towards app based content and not live TV?

Also a side question, I use my own router which uses a IGMP proxy which works perfectly for my BT TV Box Pro, I assume it wont alter that side of things?

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

DarrenDev — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:01:25 GMT

Yes - MAUD is about delivering "over the top" content to apps, where multiple people would be watching the same thing at the same time. e.g. any of the live channels in any of the apps, across any devices. Multicast is a very specific technology that only works in controlled situations (which is why it has been so hard to get other routers working).

MAUD is being pushed as an open standard, so hopefully 3rd party routers will adopt it. Where incompatible routers are used, the service will continue to work as they currently do. MAUD on the router will be transparent to the user - routers will just optimise traffic where they can.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

naylor2006 — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:12:28 GMT

Oh I see, thanks for the explanation, so as far as watching live channels on the BT Box which is using Multicast Streaming this will be unaffected.

Its more for the 10 people in one house watching live TV via BBC iPlayer the content is only delivered once?

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

DarrenDev — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:17:57 GMT

Yes, that's an extreme example affecting just you in the home. The benefit is at the wider scale though - the core network across the UK. If all the network bandwidth is consumed by so many million people watching the Olympics opening ceremony on Freely (which will deliver channels the same way that iPlayer does), then there's no internet left for anything else.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

Crimliar — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:30:43 GMT

The conversation seems to be going off on a tangent here. BT have not just invented "multicasting" - that was first standardised back in 1986and most consumer routers and streaming devices have no issue with multicast streams. MAUD if my understanding is correct is about how those streams are bundled together and distributed across the internet backbone - you won't be getting that fat pipe of streams sent down every household tributary of the internet.

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

DarrenDev — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:36:31 GMT

MAUD is about using Multicast to carry live Unicast streams across the network core. That's the new bit @Crimliar

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

naylor2006 — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:31:21 GMT

Yeah, I was just trying to understand the difference between the existing Multicast methods and MAUD, that was the basis behind my question. Indeed I am aware Multicast has been around for yonks!

Re: BT “MAUD” Multicast Streaming Breakthrough- reducing lag?

zulu17 — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 19:25:23 GMT

A BT newsroom release

https://newsroom.bt.com/bt-group-and-edgio-announce-worlds-first-maud-enabled-content-delivery-network/

gives details of progress. couple of snippets

BT Group announces that it will collaborate with Edgio, as their first partner, to integrate their CDN into its MAUD technology solution. They plan to trial delivery of EE TV content on some set-top-boxes in the live network, in the coming months.

BT Group will showcase MAUD at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) 2024, taking place 13-16 September in Amsterdam.