Author: viewcast

How one architecture solves streaming’s impossible problems

Everything We’ve Covered

Over this series, we’ve exposed the fundamental flaws in how streaming works today:

• $200,000/hour: The true cost of serving 1 million viewers via CDN
• 306 megatons of CO2: The environmental waste of redundant unicast delivery
• Negative margins: Why FAST channels mathematically cannot profit with unicast
• Inevitable failures: Why major events always crash, regardless of infrastructure
• 8K impossibility: Why next-gen video can never work on today’s architecture

The problems are clear. Now let’s talk about the solution.

Introducing SmartCast

SmartCast is Viewcast’s patented multicast technology that fundamentally changes how video reaches viewers.

The core principle is simple: Instead of sending one stream per viewer, send one stream that reaches all viewers.

Metric	Traditional CDN	SmartCast
Streams for 1M viewers	1,000,000	1
Bandwidth required	8 Tbps	8 Mbps
Cost per hour	$200,000	$200
Scaling	O(n) – linear	O(1) – constant

That’s not an optimization. It’s a completely different architecture.

How SmartCast Works

Step 1: Content Ingestion

Your video enters the SmartCast network from any standard source—live encoders, file-based content, or third-party feeds. No special equipment required. Standard RTMP, SRT, or HLS input.

Step 2: Network Distribution

SmartCast distributes content using true IP multicast principles. One stream travels the backbone network. Replication happens at network branch points. ISPs receive a single feed they distribute locally.

Step 3: Viewer Delivery

Viewers receive content through standard methods—HLS/DASH for web and mobile, native apps for Smart TVs, IPTV for set-top boxes. No special software or plugins required.

The magic happens in the network, not on the device.

The Business Impact

For Broadcasters

Problem: CDN costs consuming 70-90% of operating budget
Solution: SmartCast reduces delivery costs by 90%+

Real example: A national broadcaster spending $2M/year on CDN reduced to under $200K—freeing $1.8M for content and growth.

For FAST Channels

Before SmartCast:
Revenue: $35,000/month | CDN costs: $167,000/month | Margin: -$132,000 (LOSS)

After SmartCast:
Revenue: $35,000/month | Delivery: $12,000/month | Margin: +$23,000 (PROFIT)

For Sports & Live Events

Problem: Crashes, buffering, quality drops during peak moments
Solution: Unlimited concurrent viewers without infrastructure strain

Whether 100,000 or 100 million tune in, SmartCast delivers the same reliable experience.

Proven at Scale

SmartCast isn’t theoretical. It’s operational today:

• DanceTV: 24/7 global music television channel serving audiences worldwide with zero buffering
• National Broadcasters: Government and public broadcasters in multiple countries
• Hospitality Partners: Major casino and hotel chains delivering custom entertainment
• Telecom Bundles: ISPs bundling SmartCast-powered channels with broadband packages

The Environmental Advantage

Traditional streaming for 1 million viewers: 5,000-20,000 servers, 1-4 MW power, 400-1,600 kg CO2/hour

SmartCast for 1 million viewers: 10-50 servers, 10-50 kW power, 4-20 kg CO2/hour

97.5% reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions.

SmartCast is by far the greenest streaming technology available.

The Only Long-Term Solution

We’ve spent this series explaining why streaming is broken. Let us be clear about the conclusion:

There is no CDN optimization that solves these problems.
There is no codec that compresses away the bandwidth.
There is no cloud that scales infinitely at zero cost.

The only solution is to stop sending redundant copies of identical content. The only architecture that does this is multicast.

SmartCast is how multicast works on the modern internet.

Start the Conversation

Whether you’re a broadcaster drowning in CDN costs, a FAST operator struggling with unit economics, a sports league worried about next season’s streams, or an enterprise looking for efficient video distribution—we should talk.

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About Viewcast

Viewcast is a streaming technology company headquartered in Amsterdam and Ventura, California. Our patented SmartCast technology has been tested by Lockheed Martin, deployed with Comcast, and powers content delivery for broadcasters, platforms, and enterprises worldwide.

Our mission: Make streaming work the way broadcast always has—one signal, unlimited viewers, sustainable economics.

Contact: info@viewcast.tv | viewcast.tv

Streaming. Solved.

Why the next generation of video is physically impossible with unicast delivery

The Promise They Can’t Keep

Every year at CES, TV manufacturers unveil stunning 8K displays. Samsung, LG, Sony—they all promise breathtaking clarity, four times the resolution of 4K, sixteen times the pixels of 1080p.

The marketing is beautiful. The demos are jaw-dropping. And there’s just one problem:

There’s no way to actually deliver 8K content to your home at scale.

The Bandwidth Reality Check

Resolution	Typical Bitrate	Data per Hour
720p HD	4 Mbps	1.8 GB
1080p Full HD	8 Mbps	3.6 GB
4K UHD	25 Mbps	11.3 GB
8K UHD	80-100 Mbps	36-45 GB

8K requires 10x the bandwidth of current HD streaming.

The Math at Scale

For 1 million concurrent 8K viewers:

1,000,000 viewers × 80 Mbps = 80 Tbps

Current global internet backbone: ~500-1000 Tbps total. A single 8K live event with 1 million viewers would consume 8-16% of the entire internet’s capacity.

The Jake Paul vs. Tyson fight had 65 million viewers. At 8K? That would require 5,200 Tbps—five times more bandwidth than the entire internet has.

The CDN Cost Apocalypse

For 1 million viewer-hours at 8K:

• Data transferred: 45 PB (petabytes)
• CDN cost at $0.03/GB: $1,350,000

A 3-hour sports event for 10M viewers = $40 million in delivery costs alone. No business model survives those economics.

Why “The Internet Will Improve” Is Wrong

CDN price decline has stalled:

• 1995-2015: Bandwidth costs dropped 99%
• 2015-2020: Costs dropped ~20%
• 2020-2025: Costs essentially flat

Per CacheFly’s analysis, we may see price increases in 2025-2026 for the first time ever.

And Then There’s VR

Format	Required Bitrate
VR 180°	100-150 Mbps
VR 360°	150-250 Mbps
Volumetric Video	500+ Mbps
Light Field	1+ Gbps

Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest—these devices preview a future where video isn’t flat. But that future requires bandwidth we simply don’t have.

What Actually Works: Multicast

Multicast delivery doesn’t have these limitations:

Metric	Unicast 8K (1M viewers)	Multicast 8K (1M viewers)
Bandwidth	80 Tbps	80 Mbps
Cost	$1.35M/hour	~$200/hour
Feasibility	Impossible	Works today

With multicast: 8K requires the same infrastructure as 4K. VR scales identically. Future formats are automatically supported. Costs don’t change with resolution.

The Future Is Multicast or Nothing

Path A: Continue with unicast

• 4K remains the ceiling
• 8K stays a showroom demo
• VR remains a niche

Path B: Embrace multicast

• 8K becomes viable
• VR scales to mainstream
• Video finally fulfills its potential

There is no Path C. The physics don’t allow it.

Sending the same bits millions of times was always a hack. True broadcasting is the only answer.

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Sources

• Samsung: 8K Streaming Requirements
• Netflix: Bandwidth Requirements
• CacheFly: CDN Pricing Trends 2024

The physics problem that no amount of infrastructure can solve

It Wasn’t Your WiFi

Remember the last time a major live stream failed you? Maybe it was the Super Bowl. Maybe Game of Thrones. Maybe a boxing match you paid $79.99 to watch. The stream froze. The quality dropped. Or it just didn’t load at all.

You probably blamed your internet connection. Maybe you restarted your router. Yelled at your ISP.

It wasn’t you. It wasn’t your ISP. It was the fundamental architecture of how streaming works.

A Brief History of Streaming Failures

Event	Year	Platform	What Happened
Game of Thrones Finale	2019	HBO Max	Service crashed, millions couldn’t watch
Disney+ Launch	2019	Disney+	Hours of outages on day one
Jake Paul vs Tyson	2024	Netflix	65M viewers, widespread issues
AWS re:Invent	2020	Amazon	Amazon’s own stream crashed on AWS

That last one bears repeating: Amazon couldn’t reliably stream their own conference using their own servers. If the company that invented cloud computing can’t solve this problem, what makes anyone think more servers will help?

The Architecture of Failure

When you press play on a live stream, your device requests a stream from a server. The CDN finds the nearest edge server. A dedicated stream is created just for you. Every single viewer gets their own personal stream.

The Math Problem

For a major event with 10 million concurrent viewers at 8 Mbps each:

Total bandwidth required: 80 Tbps (terabits per second)

For context, the entire internet backbone capacity is ~500-1000 Tbps. A single major event can consume 8-16% of global internet capacity.

Where It Breaks

• Origin Bottleneck: The source server can only push so much data
• CDN Capacity: Edge servers have finite capacity; popular events overwhelm specific regions
• Network Congestion: Everyone is pulling from the same pipes
• The Thundering Herd: Millions hit “play” simultaneously; requests overwhelm infrastructure

Why Money Can’t Fix This

Netflix spends $1.3 billion annually on AWS infrastructure. They’ve built their own CDN (Open Connect). They have the best engineers in streaming.

And they still had issues during the Jake Paul vs. Tyson fight with 65 million concurrent viewers.

Why? Because you can’t buy your way out of O(n) scaling:

Cost = Viewers × Per-Viewer-Cost

Double the viewers = Double the cost = Double the infrastructure. There’s no economy of scale that makes this better.

The Broadcast Paradox

Broadcast television solved this problem 70 years ago:

1. One signal goes to the transmitter
2. The transmitter broadcasts to the coverage area
3. Unlimited receivers pick up the signal
4. Zero additional cost per viewer

Whether 10 people or 10 million people tune into the Super Bowl over-the-air, the broadcaster sends exactly the same signal.

The Multicast Solution

Instead of sending 65 million separate streams, imagine:

1. One stream leaves the origin
2. Network routers replicate at branch points
3. Local distribution handles the last mile
4. All 65 million viewers receive the same data

The bandwidth math changes completely:

Unicast (65M viewers): 520 Tbps
Multicast (65M viewers): ~10-50 Gbps total

Reduction: 99.99%

The Technology Exists

At Viewcast, we’ve built SmartCast to solve exactly this problem:

• Works with standard devices: No special hardware or apps
• Compatible with existing infrastructure: ISPs don’t need to change anything
• Seamless viewer experience: Just press play
• True multicast efficiency: One stream, unlimited viewers

DanceTV runs on SmartCast today. No buffering. No quality drops. No infrastructure panic during popular moments.

The Choice Facing the Industry

Streaming can continue down the current path: keep adding servers, keep negotiating CDN contracts, keep hoping events don’t get “too popular,” keep issuing refunds and apologies.

Or it can embrace the architecture that actually works: multicast delivery, fixed infrastructure regardless of viewership, reliable delivery at any scale.

The Super Bowl will stream again next year. The question is: will viewers actually be able to watch it?

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Sources

• Meta Engineering: Scaling Live Streaming
• CloudZero: Netflix AWS Spending
• Haivision: Unicast vs Multicast

Why an $11.68 billion industry is bleeding cash—and what it takes to fix it

The Fastest-Growing Money Pit in Media

FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV) is the hottest trend in media. The numbers are staggering: $11.68 billion global market in 2025, 42% growth in channel count since 2023, 100 million monthly users on Tubi alone.

Yet here’s the uncomfortable truth that industry insiders won’t say publicly: Most FAST channels are losing money on every viewer.

The FAST Economic Paradox

Revenue Side: Ad-Supported

FAST channels generate revenue through advertising. With average CPMs of $15-25 and 8-12 minutes of ads per hour, revenue per viewer-hour is just $0.02-0.05.

Cost Side: The Hidden Killer

Here’s what FAST platforms don’t advertise: total delivery cost per viewer-hour is $0.03-0.06. That includes CDN delivery, encoding, origin/storage, and platform fees.

Wait. Read that again.

Revenue per viewer-hour: $0.02-0.05
Cost per viewer-hour: $0.03-0.06

That’s negative unit economics.

The Unicast Death Spiral

Traditional streaming uses unicast delivery—one stream per viewer. The more successful your channel becomes, the faster you bleed money:

• 10,000 viewers = $300-600/hour delivery cost
• 100,000 viewers = $3,000-6,000/hour delivery cost
• 1,000,000 viewers = $30,000-60,000/hour delivery cost

The Real Numbers: A 1M Viewer-Hour Analysis

A moderately successful FAST channel with 1 million viewer-hours per month:

Unicast Delivery

Revenue: $35,000 (ad revenue)
Costs: $167,000 (CDN + encoding + operations)
Margin: -$132,000/month (LOSS)

With Multicast (SmartCast)

Revenue: $35,000
Costs: $12,000 (fixed delivery)
Margin: +$23,000/month (PROFIT)

The same channel goes from -$132,000 loss to +$23,000 profit.

The Multicast Solution

What if delivery costs were fixed instead of per-viewer?

Viewers	Unicast Cost/Hour	Multicast Cost/Hour
10,000	$300-600	$50-100
100,000	$3,000-6,000	$50-100
1,000,000	$30,000-60,000	$50-100
10,000,000	$300,000-600,000	$50-100

With multicast, costs are constant regardless of viewership.

The Path to Profitable FAST

The FAST channels that will survive the shakeout share common traits:

1. Low delivery costs (own infrastructure or efficient partnerships)
2. Premium content (sports, exclusive programming)
3. Strong ad sales (direct relationships, not just programmatic)
4. Operational efficiency (lean teams, automated workflows)

Notably absent: any channel relying purely on unicast CDN delivery at standard rates.

The Bottom Line

FAST channels are losing money because they’re using 1990s delivery technology for a 2025 business model. Unicast was fine when streaming meant hundreds of viewers. It breaks at millions.

The $11.68 billion FAST market isn’t going away—demand is real and growing. But the current delivery economics are unsustainable. Something has to give.

The channels that figure this out first will dominate. The rest will become cautionary tales in media industry case studies.

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Sources

• Statista: FAST Market Forecast
• Nielsen: FAST Viewing Statistics 2025

The environmental cost of sending the same bits 100 million times

The Inconvenient Truth About Your Netflix Habit

Every time you press play on a live stream, you’re not just watching—you’re contributing to an environmental footprint that rivals entire countries.

The streaming industry generates 306 megatons of CO2 annually—equivalent to the total yearly emissions of Spain. And here’s the uncomfortable reality: most of that pollution is completely unnecessary.

The Numbers That Should Alarm You

According to the International Energy Agency, one hour of streaming generates approximately 36-55 grams of CO2—the equivalent of driving your car for 222 meters.

Doesn’t sound like much? Now multiply that by billions of hours streamed daily.

The Super Bowl Problem

When 100 million people tune into the Super Bowl via streaming, here’s what actually happens:

• 100 million separate streams are created
• Each stream is identical—same bits, same pixels, same everything
• CDN servers around the world duplicate the content 100 million times
• Total redundant data transmitted: ~450 petabytes

That’s 99,999,999 wasted copies of identical content.

The carbon footprint of that single event? Over 10,000 kg of CO2—equivalent to driving a car around the Earth’s equator.

Why Traditional Streaming Is Inherently Wasteful

Traditional streaming uses “unicast” delivery—one stream per viewer. Every viewer requires their own dedicated connection, their own copy of the data, their own slice of server resources.

The Server Farm Reality

To serve 1 million concurrent viewers via unicast, you need:

• 5,000-20,000 edge servers actively running
• Each server consuming 500-800 watts
• Total power draw: 1-4 megawatts continuously
• Per hour electricity: 1,000-4,000 kWh
• CO2 emissions: 400-1,600 kg per hour

And that’s just for ONE million viewers. Major events attract 10, 50, even 65 million concurrent viewers (Netflix’s Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight hit 65 million streams in November 2024).

The Data Center Paradox

The streaming industry loves to tout its efficiency improvements: better compression codecs, more efficient server hardware, renewable energy data centers, AI-optimized routing.

But here’s what they won’t tell you: All these improvements happen at the data center level. The fundamental waste happens on the network.

It doesn’t matter how efficiently Netflix encodes a video if they’re still sending 65 million separate copies over the internet. The network duplication is where the real waste occurs.

What If There Was Another Way?

For 70 years, broadcast television has delivered content to millions using a simple principle: send once, receive many.

A TV station transmits one signal. Whether 10 people or 10 million people tune in, the transmission is identical. Zero marginal cost per viewer. Zero additional environmental impact per viewer.

Multicast: Broadcast for the Internet

The same principle can work over IP networks. It’s called multicast. The environmental math changes completely:

Metric	Unicast (1M viewers)	Multicast (1M viewers)
Streams created	1,000,000	1
Network load	8,000,000 Mbps	8 Mbps
Servers active	5,000-20,000	~10
Power consumption	1-4 MW	10-50 kW
CO2 per hour	400-1,600 kg	4-20 kg

That’s a 99% reduction in environmental impact.

The Green Streaming Revolution

The streaming industry is at an inflection point:

1. Traffic is exploding: Video traffic doubles every few years
2. Resolution is increasing: 4K is standard, 8K is coming, VR requires even more
3. Efficiency gains are slowing: Moore’s Law has stalled
4. Climate pressure is mounting: Net-zero commitments require action

The current trajectory is unsustainable. We cannot 10x video traffic while meeting climate goals using unicast delivery.

The SmartCast Approach

At Viewcast, we’ve built exactly this. Our SmartCast technology:

• Delivers one stream that serves unlimited viewers
• Uses existing ISP infrastructure for last-mile distribution
• Achieves 97.5% reduction in delivery costs—and proportional CO2 reduction
• Makes sustainable streaming economically viable

It’s not theoretical. DanceTV runs on SmartCast today, serving global audiences with a fraction of the environmental footprint of traditional CDN delivery.

The Choice Is Clear

Every streaming executive, every content provider, every platform has a choice:

Option A: Keep using unicast. Keep sending redundant copies. Keep building server farms. Keep buying carbon offsets. Hope nobody notices.

Option B: Adopt multicast architecture. Reduce waste by 99%. Make streaming sustainable. Lead the industry forward.

The technology exists. The economics work. The only question is whether the industry has the will to change.

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Sources

• IEA: The Carbon Footprint of Streaming Video
• Carbon Trust: Carbon Impact of Video Streaming
• Ericsson Mobility Report 2024

Why the biggest names in streaming are hemorrhaging money—and why it will only get worse.

The Number They Don’t Want You to See

When Netflix, Disney+, or ESPN quotes you their streaming costs, they’re showing you the tip of the iceberg. The real number? For a major live event with 1 million concurrent viewers, traditional streaming costs approximately $200,000 per hour.

That’s not a typo. And that’s not even for the Super Bowl—that’s just a moderately popular live stream.

Let’s break down exactly where that money goes, why it’s unavoidable with current technology, and why the entire streaming industry is built on a foundation that mathematically cannot scale.

The Anatomy of a $200,000 Hour

Raw Bandwidth: The Obvious Cost

For 1 million viewers watching a 1080p stream at 8 Mbps:

• Data transferred per hour: 1,000,000 × 8 Mbps × 3,600 seconds = 3.6 petabytes
• CDN cost at $0.05/GB: 3,600,000 GB × $0.05 = $180,000

But that’s just the CDN delivery. Add in origin server egress ($15,000), transcoding/encoding ($3,000), and infrastructure overhead ($2,000), and you reach ~$200,000 per hour.

The Dirty Secret: It Gets Worse at Scale

Here’s what the CDN salespeople won’t tell you: costs don’t decrease linearly with scale for live content. For on-demand video, cache hit ratios improve and costs per GB drop. But live streaming? Every single viewer needs the content right now. There’s no caching advantage. No efficiency gains. Just pure, brutal linear cost scaling:

• 10,000 viewers: $2,000/hour — manageable
• 100,000 viewers: $20,000/hour — expensive
• 1,000,000 viewers: $200,000/hour — crisis mode
• 10,000,000 viewers: $2,000,000/hour — mathematically impossible for most

Why This Problem Is About to Get Much Worse

CDN Prices Are Rising—For the First Time Ever

For 25 years, CDN prices dropped 5-10% annually. That era is ending. According to CacheFly’s 2024 analysis, we’re approaching the floor. Bandwidth costs have stabilized, but operational costs keep rising: energy costs (data centers consume 2-3% of global electricity), labor costs, and hardware (Moore’s Law has stalled).

Prediction: By 2025-2026, CDN prices will increase for the first time in internet history.

Resolution Demands Keep Growing

Your viewers don’t want 1080p anymore. They want 4K. Soon, 8K. At 8K, streaming a single hour to 1 million viewers would cost $2 million. For a 3-hour sports event? $6 million in delivery costs alone.

The Infrastructure Insanity

To deliver 1 million concurrent streams via traditional unicast CDN requires 5,000-20,000 edge servers, 500-2,000 active CDN locations, and 8+ Tbps of bandwidth capacity.

A CDN literally sends the same identical bits to the same neighborhood hundreds of thousands of times through the same wires. Imagine a mail carrier making a separate trip for each letter going to the same apartment building. That’s unicast streaming.

For a neighborhood of 1,000 households all watching the same game, the CDN sends 1,000 identical copies of every single frame, every single second. That’s 999 wasted copies.

Real-World Failures: When the Math Breaks

The streaming industry’s dirty secret is that major events regularly fail. Not because of bugs or bad planning—because the underlying architecture cannot handle the load:

• HBO Max, Game of Thrones Finale (2019): Crashed. Millions couldn’t watch.
• Disney+ Launch Day (2019): Hours of outages.
• Every Major Boxing PPV: “Technical difficulties” are now expected.

Even Amazon—which owns the infrastructure—crashed their own AWS re:Invent conference stream. If Amazon can’t stream reliably using their own servers, what chance does anyone else have?

The Math That Changes Everything

Consider two approaches for serving 1 million live viewers:

Traditional Unicast (CDN)

• Viewers: 1,000,000
• Network Load: 8,000,000 Mbps (8 Tbps)
• Cost: $200,000/hour
• Scales: Linearly O(n)

Multicast Architecture

• Viewers: 1,000,000 (or 10M, or 100M)
• Network Load: 8 Mbps (replicated at network level)
• Cost: $200/hour (fixed infrastructure)
• Scales: Constantly O(1)

That’s not a 10% improvement. That’s not even 10x. It’s 1,000x more efficient.

The Path Forward

The technology to solve this exists. It’s called multicast, and it’s been powering broadcast television since the 1950s. The challenge has been bringing it to IP networks in a way that’s practical, secure, and compatible with existing infrastructure.

That’s exactly what we’ve built at Viewcast. Our SmartCast technology delivers live streams using true multicast principles—one stream serves unlimited viewers, with fixed infrastructure costs regardless of scale.

No more $200,000 hours. No more prayers that your CDN holds up. No more choosing between quality and profitability.

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Sources

• CacheFly: CDN Pricing Trends 2024
• Meta Engineering: Scaling Live Streaming
• IEA: Carbon Footprint of Streaming Video