That's "just" a problem with unicast though. Lots of different media houses are working on getting multicast support over the internet, by which point IP streams will behave a lot more like OTA's one-to-many relationship.

I couldn't say how close they are to getting that working - nor if it even is possible - because I don't work on that specific side of things. But I do know there used to be multicast networks over the internet back in the 90s (IIRC David Bowie even streamed one of his concerts over it) so it strikes me as a solvable problem.

Bbc did multicast 20 years ago, and with most uk households on one of half a dozen isps it would be possible.

However multicast struggles over wifi and 4g.

A CDN edge box in each exchange would probably solve the problem.

Yeah, for events like the World Cup "scale" means sending the same broadcast to millions of receivers. That's already an unusual requirement, though. Major sporting events constitute the biggest use case, and perhaps even those will require something different in future if the next trend is something more interactive: VR or user controlled camera angles.

> sending the same broadcast to millions of receivers. That's already an unusual requirement, though

Broadcast television isn't particularly unusual, surely. Millions of people watch live, primetime TV every day.

In the UK, typical peak usage is around 5 million for the same program at the same time. The World Cup was more than 30 million.

Sure, but my point was that five million receivers is "millions of receivers", and is an everyday occurrence.

This is a legacy way of consuming material. More and more are using on demand first.

However the use case of live sport - especially football in the uk - is massively different. This means the platforms have to scale to 20 million plus live streams (that's say 100tbit and 5 second latency) for a once in 4 year event.