With the impending shutdown of digital terrestrial and satellite television, the industry urgently needs a truly scalable, high-performing TV architecture over an entirely different technology stack. Recorded live from IBC2025, episode 13 of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the ‘Ultra Low Latency Live Streaming at Scale’ project who picked up the gauntlet.

Building on the foundation of the previous year’s Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports accelerator (an L3D-DASH implementation), this project focused on the architecture needed to deliver live TV over the internet, introducing functionality expected from a production DTT channel using new open specifications. The goal was to deliver the same latency, stability, and feature set as digital terrestrial and satellite television.

The Accelerator explored key technical components, including CDN and multicast ABR (mABR) integration, personalised ad insertion, and the use of CMCD v2 (upcoming CTA 5004-A) for Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring and ad beaconing. The primary objective was to achieve ultra-low latency glass-to-glass delivery, near-instant playback start, and tight synchronisation across multiple viewers on consumer devices.

In this episode, Mark Smith, Lead for the IBC Accelerator Programme, was joined by Piers O'Hanlon, Senior Research and Development Engineer at BBC R&D, and Michael Loftus, Media Streaming Infrastructure Lead at RTÉ.

Live at IBC2025, the project group discussed how they created a low-latency DASH-based streaming system for RTÉ News and a synthetic RTÉ Sports sequence. The team also reflected on how the industry could build on this blueprint of a viable low-latency DTT replacement in the future.