Telcos moving live TV to IP have been forced to choose: the efficiency of legacy multicast or the flexibility of OTT unicast. NPAW Valeria refuses the trade-off, carrier-grade multicast with adaptive streaming, universal device reach and per-session visibility.
Inside every telco TV division, the same argument repeats. The network team loves multicast: one stream per channel, whatever the audience, with prime time costing no more than 3 a.m. The product team loves OTT: multi-screen, adaptive quality, modern apps, weekly release cycles. Legacy multicast is locked into rigid set-top-box ecosystems with zero per-session visibility; pure unicast OTT multiplies egress and strains backhaul at every peak. Both teams are right, and the operator flies blind on quality either way.
Valeria, NPAW’s carrier-grade multicast-to-ABR platform, is built to end the argument. It ingests live channels as standard IGMP/PIM multicast on the operator’s own network and serves them as HLS or DASH to any ABR-capable device, smart TV, set-top box, mobile, browser.
One stream per channel. Any audience.
The core mechanic is elegantly simple: a single multicast group per channel, regardless of how many households tune in. Access-network egress collapses toward zero growth, whatever the concurrency. On multicast-enabled endpoints, channel change stays under 200 milliseconds, the snappy zapping experience traditional IPTV subscribers expect.
Coverage is universal by design. Sessions that cannot ride multicast, a phone on Wi-Fi outside the footprint, a roaming tablet, fall back seamlessly to unicast ABR, on the operator network or the public CDN. No viewer is left behind, and no engineer has to choose who gets the good path.
Valeria integrates with existing headend, middleware and DRM stacks, Ericsson, Minerva and Metrological are already tested, so modernisation does not mean rip-and-replace.
Telcos told us they love the economics of multicast but hate the blindness. Valeria gives them the efficiency of native IP multicast with the operational visibility they’re used to in OTT. That combination didn’t exist before.
The end of flying blind
What separates Valeria from every legacy multicast deployment is the analytics layer it inherits from the NPAW Suite. Every session, multicast or fallback, is instrumented: startup time, buffering ratio, bitrate, error rate, per user, per channel, per device, per region. Operators get, for the first time, per-session QoE on every linear channel, turning capacity planning and subscriber care from guesswork into engineering.
The quantified benefits are substantial: up to 90% reduction in live-TV bandwidth on the access and aggregation network versus unicast, hundreds of concurrent channels served from one origin without proportional bandwidth growth, and integration measured in weeks, not months, for operators already running NPAW analytics.
Valeria and Orion: two halves of one strategy
Valeria is designed for the network you own; its sibling Orion handles the internet you don’t. Many operators will run both, native multicast inside the managed footprint, Multicast-ABR over public CDNs for overflow and out-of-network viewers, under one analytics roof. General availability arrives in Q4 2026; a pilot programme is open now for operators with existing NPAW deployments, scoped to a channel subset on one network segment with hands-on integration support.
At a Glance
Meet NPAW at IBC 2026, Hall 5, Stand F44
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About NPAW
NPAW is the leading business intelligence company for streaming video providers. Using the NPAW Suite of monitoring and delivery solutions, we service over 200 global OTTs, broadcasters and telecom operators. Learn more about the NPAW Suite today.