US 12549791 B2 / Feb 10, 2026

Reducing network bandwidth consumption of real-time broadcasts using generically encoded media objects

Described herein are ways to reduce bandwidth use for real-time broadcasts between an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and its subscribers by re-encoding audiovisual data streams to have a generic encoding that can be viewed by subscribers of different content providers. A system can determine that a plurality of subscribers is watching the same live event and can multicast the generic encoding of the live event to the plurality of subscribers, even where individual subscribers stream the live event from different content providers. This can eliminate the need for streaming multiple versions of the same live event from different content providers to subscribers. The systems can generically encode an audiovisual data stream of a live event to generate a single audiovisual data stream for the live event that is multicast to subscribers watching the same live event.