Multicast Support: Broadcast Economics on a Managed Network

Vodlix multicast support brings broadcast economics to live streaming on managed networks. With unicast delivery over the open internet, every viewer receives their own copy of the stream, so a popular live channel becomes your most expensive and riskiest moment as the audience grows. Multicast sends the stream once and lets the network deliver it to every receiver, so cost no longer scales with audience size. For operators running IPTV on their own networks, multicast is the efficient way to carry live channels.

Vodlix multicast is designed for operators who control the network between the headend and the subscriber: telecoms, cable operators, hotels, campuses and enterprise networks. On those managed networks, multicast delivers live channels at broadcast scale with minimal bandwidth. For audiences on the open internet, where multicast is not available, Vodlix delivers the same channels via unicast from a global CDN edge network. Operators choose the delivery method that fits their infrastructure.

With Vodlix multicast, the network carries one copy of a live stream and duplicates it only at the points where paths to receivers diverge. Instead of the source sending thousands of identical streams, the routers replicate the stream as close to the viewers as possible. This dramatically reduces bandwidth at the headend and across the core network. The result is live channel delivery whose cost is largely independent of how many people are watching.

Vodlix multicast is suited to live channels, where every viewer is watching the same moment at the same time. It offers nothing for on demand content, where each viewer is at a different point in a different title and needs their own stream. Operators typically combine multicast for linear channels with unicast delivery for VOD, using the right method for each. Understanding this distinction is what allows a hybrid IPTV service to be both efficient and complete.