Every record-breaking live audience carries a hidden invoice: unicast delivery scales cost one-to-one with viewers. NPAW Orion brings Multicast-ABR to public CDNs and the open internet, so the biggest night of your year stops being the most expensive.
The economics of live streaming have a design flaw. With traditional unicast delivery, every concurrent viewer is a separate stream, so a cup final, a title fight or a global keynote means CDN egress that scales linearly with success. Operators are left with two bad options: over-provision and pay for headroom they rarely use, or cap concurrency and degrade the experience for their most valuable audience at the worst possible moment.
Broadcast solved this problem decades ago, one signal, any number of receivers, but broadcast does not speak the language of the modern streaming stack: adaptive bitrate, DRM, ad insertion, per-device manifests. The industry has been waiting for something that combines broadcast economics with OTT behaviour, on networks nobody owns end to end.
Multicast-ABR for networks you don’t own
Orion is NPAW’s answer: a Multicast-ABR acceleration layer for public CDNs and the open internet. It detects bursty live audiences in real time and transparently promotes them to multicast delivery, one efficient stream serving many viewers, while standard ABR manifests, DRM flows, ad insertion and CDN token authentication remain completely unchanged.
The critical design decision is the fallback. Any viewer whose network does not carry the multicast group falls back to native unicast automatically, no visible quality drop, no client-side toggle, no exotic player. The audience never knows which path served them; the finance team definitely will.
Orion works with every major CDN through origin-shield integration, supports HLS, DASH and CMAF, and passes Widevine, PlayReady and FairPlay DRM straight through.
Orion is the missing piece between “unicast everywhere” and “true IP multicast.” Our customers didn’t want a forklift upgrade, they wanted a switch they could flip per event. That’s exactly what Orion is.
Pay for what you save
The numbers from the programme so far are the headline: up to 70% reduction in peak egress during live events, and an 8–14× higher concurrent-viewer ceiling on the same infrastructure. Integration effort on NPAW instrumented players averages under 45 minutes, with zero changes to the end-user client.
The commercial model follows the same logic: usage-based pricing on gigabytes delivered in multicast mode. Operators pay in proportion to the bandwidth they actually save, no per-viewer seat licensing, no upfront commitment.
Measured, not promised
Because Orion is part of the NPAW stack, delivery mode, bandwidth saved and perceived QoE are reported per session into the same analytics operators already trust. Efficiency claims stop being vendor slideware and become a dashboard you can audit. General availability lands in Q3 2026; an early-access programme is open now to NPAW customers, with pilots validated against each customer’s real live event calendar. For operators who also run managed networks, Orion pairs naturally with its sibling Valeria multicast inside the network you own, Orion for everything beyond it.
At a Glance
Tell us your next live event size, we’ll model the delivery efficiency impact
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.