The fact that British Telecom’s Director of Broadband Engineering, Ian Parr, was briefing Faultline on the UK operator’s Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD) project – rather than a Director of TV Engineering or similar – is emblematic of MAUD’s modus operandi. Broadband, BT recognizes, is TV. Preempting intense future demands on its fixed and mobile networks from large-scale linear events, MAUD is a method of coping with the mass migration to unicast delivery – via a mix of in-house multicast R&D and a helping hand from Broadpeak, a French software supplier specializing in multicast ABR. To dangle a contextual carrot for our US-based readers, MAUD is a technology perfectly suited for generating substantial network bandwidth savings – up to 50% at…