The streaming of live and on-demand events and shows has improved steadily in recent years, but those streams still tend to struggle during highly-watched tentpole events.

Of recent note, Yahoo’s Sept. 24 live stream of the Baltimore Ravens-Jacksonville Jaguars National Football League game in London didn’t go off without a hitch, as some users, particularly watching via TV-connected devices, lodged complaints about buffering and blurry images.

Initiatives such as the Streaming Video Alliance’s open caching initiative are taking aim at those scale challenges, but a content delivery network provider is also trying to solve that riddle.

Edge cloud provider Fastly is trying to get a fix on the issue with Media Shield, an offering that is akin to a control element to the streaming infrastructure and caching layer even in scenarios in which video traffic from an OTT service is travelling on multiple CDNs.

Fastly, which competes in the CDN sector with companies such as Limelight Networks and Akamai, is looking beyond “raw delivery” with Media Shield, Lee Chen, its head of strategic partnerships, said. In Chen’s view, that’s the “least interesting” technology challenge CDNs face, he said.

Related: Limelight, Akamai Bury the Hatchet

Instead, Media Shield focuses on providing a consistent quality of experience and quality of service as traffic travels to and from multiple CDN providers, ensuring that there’s a balance in elements such as low latency and quick streaming startup times. It also aims to help providers rely less on origin serves and apply more streaming resources toward the edges of the network.

By managing that from the cloud, Media Shield aims to balance the load among CDN providers and to manage and gain visibility into what’s occurring as if that video is being delivered on one unified streaming infrastructure.

Having that sort of control is becoming more important as more and more video goes online.

Related: Amazon’s First Live NFL Stream Solid, Not Perfect

The use of multi-CDNs is also becoming more the norm. All of the big OTT players have been using multi-CDN strategies for years, but even smaller providers are migrating in that direction, Dan Rayburn, executive vice president for StreamingMedia.com and principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said.

“The performance amongst CDNs for video, specifically, is so similar,” he said, adding that it’s become so inexpensive to go with multiple providers that it makes little sense for an OTT player to put all of its traffic on one CDN.

Fastly, whose customers include A+E Networks, Vimeo, Brightcove and Dish Network, isn’t alone with a system that shapes traffic on multiple CDNs.s Third parties such as Cedexis and Touchstream also provide solutions that let partners shift to other providers in real time, Rayburn said. He said Fastly’s launch of Media Shield is an acknowledgement the company won’t be a sole CDN provider to everyone, but it can still play a key role in other ways, given market shifts.

“The reality in the market is that the customers split up traffic, so Fastly is acknowledging this multi- CDN market and making [that approach] easier to use,” Rayburn said.

Limelight Networks and Akamai Technologies have come to an agreement that puts a long-standing patent fight between the content delivery network rivals to bed.

Limelight announced this week that it has entered an agreement that settles the spat centering on the ‘703 patent (US. No. 6,108,703, describing a “Global hosting system”) and certain other patents in the form of a settlement that converts the $51 million judgment handed down last year into a $54 million license that will be paid in twelve equal quarterly installments starting August 1.

Both companies have also waived all rights to appeal as part of the agreement, and Akamai will release the $51 million letter of credit that bonded the judgment.

As a result, Limelight said it will regain access to the full amount in restricted cash supporting the letter of credit this month.

Dan Rayburn, EVP for StreamingMedia.com and principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, tweeted that the agreement settles a protracted legal battle.

Limelight Networks will pay the $54M it owes to Akamai over the next 3 years. - 10 year patent suit finally over. https://t.co/IibFFbwQSF

— Dan Rayburn (@DanRayburn) August 1, 2016

However, the agreement excludes patents that Akamai asserted as counterclaims in the patent infringement case filed by Limelight against Akamai and XO Communications in the Eastern District of Virginia in late 2015 and does not otherwise impact Limelight’s rights in that case, Limelight said.

“We are pleased by the outcome of this agreement. It eliminates the continuing risk from the ‘703 patent and allows us to extend the $51 million payment over a three-year period at an attractive interest rate,” Robert Lento, chief executive officer of Limelight, said in a statement.  “This agreement, coupled with the series of financial and operational improvements, further enhances our confidence in Limelight’s value creation opportunity.”

Last month, Limelight posted a Q2 net loss of $54.9 million (53 cents per basic share) on revenues of $43.6 million, flat from $43.8 million in the year-ago quarter.

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Live-TV streaming over broadband is a small-but-growing phenomenon, and the Internet is ill-prepared for the giant wave of data about to sweep over it in the years ahead. At least that’s the view of Akamai, a top content delivery network (CDN) provider that works with a wide range of programmers and distributors.

Despite the emergence of services such as Sling TV, PlayStation Vue and CBS All Access, live linear television “hasn’t moved online yet in a big way” and remains largely the domain of on-demand and episodic TV fare, Bill Wheaton, vice president and general manager of media at Akamai, said.

But digital content rights continue to loosen, paving the way for more OTT services. While the content end of the spectrum appears to be turning the OTT corner, the question remains whether consumers will show up.

“We think they will, and that’s what we’re betting on,” Wheaton said.

Here’s how it looks today: Akamai says a typical consumer watching OTT video via its platform accounts for 10 Megabits per second or more of traffic. When extended to 5 million users — the equivalent of about four Nielsen ratings points — that represents about 50 Terabits per second of sustained demand. That’s more than Akamai delivers today for all of its customers combined.

And it’s not just about linear TV. Apps such as HBO Go and HBO Now (HBO’s new standalone OTT service) tend to see spikes on Sunday nights when the network debuts new episodes of its most popular originals.

“Even though it’s a VOD file, it behaves like a live show because people go in and watch it at the same time,” Wheaton said. “It’s not inconceivable that in four to five years, the majority of television is actually watched over an IP-delivered network.”

In Akamai’s view, the Internet must shift to a different protocol for OTT video in order to carry the load. While most OTT video today uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Akamai is proposing a move to User Datagram Protocol (UDP), an alternative system that’s known for low latency.

“We’re starting to rethink and reinvent how video is delivered, fundamentally,” Wheaton said. Most “walled-garden” IPTV services already lean on UDP. “We think [UDP] is the right way to deliver video in the long run.”

While TCP has been used in tandem with adaptive bit rate apps that ratchet the resolution and bit rate up and down based on available bandwidth, it’s not as handy when trying to deliver HD video.

UDP, by comparison, is equipped to use multicast, a more-efficient system that, unlike unicast, can deliver a stream to a group of subscribers. It also provides quicker startup times and cuts down on buffering delays.

Wheaton estimated UDP, on average, is 30% to 40% more efficient than TCP, and makes OTT streams behave “more like television.”

Akamai has been developing UDP capabilities in house, but boosted its expertise in the area in April when it acquired Octoshape, a cloud-based OTT IP video-service provider.

Wheaton said Akamai is bullish on UDP but acknowledges it will need significant buy-in. While Google has deployed its QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) protocol on Chrome browsers, that still leaves out other browsers, mobile devices, streaming players and smart TVs. So in addition to supporting UDP on servers, Akamai is faced with having to push it to to billions of consumer devices.

Akamai has rolled out a UDP software development kit that supports Linux, iOS, Android and Windows, and the company is working to get the technology integrated at the chip and connected-device level.

“We’re moving the edge further out to the edge,” Wheaton said, hopeful that Akamai can use a mixed-mode methodology during the anticipated transition.