There’s a well-known problem with streaming: capacity is shrinking as demand skyrockets. This leads to poor viewer experiences—more buffering, slower start times, and degraded video quality—especially as more viewers join the stream. Despite advances in compression and other streaming tech, the real issue is unicast delivery. The model is outdated, and it’s buckling under the strain. The truth is, we’re approaching a breaking point where networks simply won’t be able to handle the sheer volume of data required for live and on-demand content.
It’s time for a new approach. The unicast model needs to evolve into something more scalable, more efficient, and better equipped to meet the demands of modern streaming.
Streaming Replacing Broadcast? Not Quite Yet…
But before we dive into what the future holds, let’s take a step back. Traditional broadcast still plays a major role in how people consume video, especially through terrestrial, OTA, or satellite methods. And while the type of broadcast may have changed, that broadcast content is mostly not using the IP networks which make the internet possible. But the transition to streaming as the primary delivery means (building on the shift of broadcasters to IP-based networks) is gaining speed. According to Nielsen’s May 2024 viewership report, “while overall TV usage was down just slightly on a monthly basis, the researcher found streaming hauled in 38 percent of all viewership, compared to 28 percent on cable and 22 percent on broadcast.” While this data focuses on U.S. viewership, it’s likely that similar trends are emerging globally, though perhaps not as dramatically or at the same pace.
An inflection point, where more content will be consumed via streaming than traditional broadcast, may not be here yet but it’s approaching faster than we think. Over the next decade, streaming could easily surpass traditional broadcast to dominate the video landscape. When that shift happens, the weaknesses of unicast will become impossible to ignore, as duplicated high-bitrate streams overwhelm ISPs and CDNs, creating massive bottlenecks and degrading the user experience.
Decentralizing Content Delivery: The Blockcast Approach
Peer-to-peer has always presented a tempting solution to the unicast problem, allowing nearby users to share the same content and reduce the load on central networks. However, P2P has long been plagued by security issues and a shady reputation, thanks to its association with illegal content sharing on platforms like BitTorrent and Napster. Despite these setbacks, the concept still holds promise—there’s a vast amount of unused capacity in home networks, and tapping into that could significantly reduce traffic on ISP and CDN networks. Each bit delivered locally is one less bit burdening the middle mile. P2P was the first attempt at decentralizing content delivery, but we can take this concept much further.
Blockcast recognizes that while traditional peer-to-peer (P2P) networks aren’t the ultimate solution to the capacity crunch, the concept of leveraging users’ home bandwidth is a viable solution. But, instead of relying on outdated and often compromised P2P technologies, Blockcast is pioneering a new approach: creating a network of home caching nodes, all within a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN).
Think of content delivery as core infrastructure—just as essential as water or electricity, especially as streaming continues to replace traditional broadcast. DePIN allows everyone to contribute to this infrastructure and earn rewards, often through crypto tokens, for participating.
For Blockcast, this means building a caching box based on the Streaming Video Technology Alliance’s (SVTA) Home Storage specifications, which users and advanced DePIN operators can install. These nodes will cache popular content within local networks, improving the streaming experience for users while reducing ISP traffic during peak times. The result? Smoother, higher-quality streaming (like 4K) for the user and less congestion for the ISP.
By decentralizing content delivery, Blockcast empowers communities to share bandwidth more efficiently while giving users greater control over their streaming experience. It’s a win-win for ISPs and consumers alike, and it marks a significant leap forward in solving the capacity problem.
More Capacity Is More Than Just More Infrastructure
While Blockcast’s DePIN approach helps create new capacity by tapping into unused home bandwidth, it only solves part of the problem. The real bottleneck persists upstream of the ISP edge. When users request content, ISPs must still backhaul the data across their middle-mile infrastructure, resolving the request with CDNs, or even tracing it all the way back to the content origin. This journey often passes through various transport facilities and peering fabrics, creating significant congestion in the ISP’s middle mile. Even if ISPs deploy request-collapsing proxies at the edge to reduce the number of individual requests, the savings are minimal. The core issue remains: duplicative streams clog the network.
Blockcast addresses this upstream capacity issue by tackling the root cause—unicast delivery. To further enhance the efficient use of available bandwidth, Blockcast leverages multicast technology to significantly reduce the strain on the ISP’s network when delivering streaming video.
With Blockcast’s Multicast Adaptive HTTP Proxy (MAHP), content can be transmitted through the ISP middle mile via multicast, and more importantly, from edge caching nodes to multiple users via multicast as well. Once the content reaches home caching nodes, those nodes can then deliver the requested content via unicast to other users in the same area. This approach drastically reduces the number of duplicative streams traveling through the ISP network, easing congestion and enhancing the overall user experience.
Blockcast’s proprietary request routing system seamlessly manages all of this. The result is a smarter, more scalable way to handle the growing demands of streaming—without simply adding more infrastructure. Instead, Blockcast uses existing resources more intelligently, ensuring a smoother, faster, and more efficient content delivery system.
From Decentralized Network to an Open Marketplace
With a decentralized network of home users deploying caching nodes for their own benefit and earning rewards by delivering content to others, Blockcast has already made content delivery more efficient. But that’s just the beginning.
Traditionally, content delivery has been dominated by a handful of major CDN operators. Let’s say there are seven key players—these commercial CDNs likely account for at least 75% of the content delivered from caching servers or content origins to ISPs. That’s because CDNs are an essential part of the content delivery infrastructure. But no one CDN is the best at everything in every geographic region. As such, many content operators rely on multiple CDNs to ensure delivery reliability, but this comes with complications. Each CDN has its own system for handling content security (like access tokens) and purging cached content. When content needs to be updated or removed from multiple CDN caches, operators have to use different interfaces for each network, making the process time-consuming and inefficient.
The Streaming Video Technology Alliance’s (SVTA) Open Caching specifications aim to simplify this. When caches, whether they are in a CDN or an ISP network, are Open Caching compliant, content owners can use a single interface to manage functions like purging content across all of their caching infrastructure. This interoperability is a game-changer, as it allows content operators to unify their approach to content delivery, reducing operational complexity and improving flexibility across networks.
But the complexity of controlling a heterogeneous delivery architecture isn’t the only flaw in how commercial content delivery operates today. Another major issue is the role ISPs play in the chain. Currently, ISPs aren’t compensated by CDNs but are responsible for delivering the content to their subscribers. Commercial CDNs charge the content owner for delivering content, but once it reaches the ISP network, the ISP takes on the burden of backhauling the content through their middle mile and fulfilling user requests—all without receiving any compensation. This imbalance becomes even more contentious when large ISPs also run their own CDNs and struggle to capture their fair share of the market.
And it’s not just traditional ISPs at play anymore. We now have OTA broadcasters using ATSC 3.0 stations and mobile operators with eMBMS broadcast capabilities, both of which offer new capacity for delivering content. However, these operators have no streamlined way of participating in content delivery, especially in reaching audiences in rural or less connected regions where traditional CDNs don’t peer with local ISPs.
The solution is an Open Capacity Marketplace.
This marketplace would allow content owners to make requests for capacity that could include a mix of providers including CDNs, ISPs, DePIN operators, Blockcast nodes in user’s homes, ATSC 3.0 broadcasters with datacasting channels, mobile broadcasters, and satellite operators. But what makes it really work is the Blockcast Network, an overlay network through which all of the interfaces and business relationships (between content owners and capacity providers) are managed. Leveraging distributed ledger and smart contracts, content owners and providers are completely assured of what bits are delivered so that settlement can happen without any question of transparency or trust.
Moving Content Delivery From a Web2 to a Web3 World
Independent of the obvious efficiency gained by shifting from unicast to multicast, Blockcast is trying to pull content delivery from a Web2 world, built on one-directional relationships and log files, to a Web3 framework that decentralizes the very nature of the delivery chain and how the bits are accounted for. There has been a history of attempts at traffic federation and none of them have been successful. But that’s because the technology pieces, such as distributed ledgers, smart contracts, AMT, Open Caching, and more, weren’t available. But they are now just waiting for a company like Blockcast to snap them all together in a platform that makes content delivery more efficient, and cost effective, than before.
