Five years ago this week… A Deutsche Telekom-led webinar made the operator’s position blunt on the future being unicast-first, even if it meant breaking away from DVB, multicast dependencies, and deeply integrated set top ecosystems. Multicast ABR was acknowledged, but only as a transition layer rather than a long-term architecture. Vendors like Broadpeak and Wyplay pushed back with real-world scaling concerns, particularly around live sports, where pure unicast could fail under load. RDK Central tried to position its stack as the compromise layer enabling portability and control across fragmented devices. Today, that direction of travel has largely played out, with unicast and ABR dominating streaming delivery, while multicast survives in targeted use cases and operators move further into software-defined platforms…