USC women’s water polo is locked in with its 21st consecutive trip to the NCAA Tournament, looking for the program’s eighth national championship when the Trojans head to Indianapolis next week. The No. 3 seed in this 2025 bracket, USC (27-4) opens up against Harvard (26-6) in the NCAA Quarterfinals on May 9 at the IU Natatorium.

USC has been a top-three team in the nation all season and earned the No. 2 seed for the 2025 MPSF Tournament. Under the direction of head coach Casey Moon for the second full season, USC had four Trojans earn All-MPSF honors this year, including Olympians and First Team honorees Tilly Kearns and Emily Ausmus, who became the third Trojan all-time to be named MPSF Newcomer of the Year. Sophomore Rachel Gazzaniga picked up a spot on the All-MPSF Second Team, and freshman Alma Yaacobi earned All-MPSF Honorable Mention as well as a spot on the MPSF All-Newcomer Team alongside Ausmus. Kearns, Gazzaniga and Ava Stryker are the Trojans’ returning All-Americans for a 2025 USC team averaging 17.3 goals per game in the program’s most high-powered offensive seasons in history. This is the first time a USC team has scored more than 500 goals in a single season.

This year’s National Collegiate field includes six automatic qualifiers from conference championships and three at-large teams. Seven teams qualify directly to the championship field, and the remaining two teams will compete in an Opening Round game on May 7. That winner will advance to quarterfinal games set for May 9, with semifinals held May 10 and the NCAA Championship game set for 12 p.m .ET on May 11. All games will be played at IU Natatorium in Indianapolis, Ind. Quarterfinals and semifinals will stream live on NCAA.com, and the NCAA Championship game will be televised on ESPNU and streamed on ESPN+.

Earning automatic berths this year are Stanford (MPSF), Harvard (CWPA), Loyola Marymount (Golden Coast), Hawai’i (Big West), McKendree (WWPA) and Wagner (MAAC). This year’s at-large teams are California, UCLA and USC — all out of the MPSF.

Winners of seven previous national championships, USC holds a 41-15 all-time record in NCAA tournaments. The Trojans last won it all in 2021. Last year, the Trojans entered NCAA action in Berkeley with a 18-8 record after a fourth-place finish in the 2024 MPSF Tournament. USC opened the 2024 NCAA Tournament against Stanford in the quarterfinals and fell 8-3 to the Cardinal.

USC’s first national title came in 1999 before the NCAA sponsored women’s water polo. In 2004, USC posted the first-ever undefeated season on the way to capturing the 2014 NCAA title. USC’s third title came in 2010 — the last time the Trojans swept the MPSF coach, player and newcomer awards — in a championship won over Stanford. Three years later in 2013, the Trojans topped the Cardinal in tripe sudden-death overtime — the longest NCAA final in history — to claim a fourth national championship for USC. In another three years, USC was back on top once more, posting a second undefeated season en route to the 2016 NCAA Championship in another epic battle against Stanford. The 2018 campaign brought USC its sixth crown in a defensive 5-4 win over Stanford at the Trojans’ Uytengsu Aquatics Center. In 2021, USC overpowered UCLA with an 18-9 final win that set an NCAA record for goals scored and margin of victory in a final and secured USC’s seventh national championship.

 

For football aficionados in the UK, the seemingly rather abrupt end of Amazon Prime Video showing Premier League games at select points in the season – especially in the pre- and post-Christmas window – is perhaps something of regret. It is maybe a matter of debate as to whether this regret is shared by the country’s online network operators. While mass coverage of games got glowing reports from fans, operators’ networks glowed almost literally. And in early December 2023, the burden imposed by mass demand for Prime Video viewers to watch Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City among others play on the same evening saw both football and online nets stretched, almost to the limit.

Almost immediately after, telecoms company BT brought MAUD on to the pitch. Not a substitute in the sporting sense but a new methodology designed to ensure that mass demand for the delivery of online video content – in particular sports and games – would not compromise the quality of viewing experience.

So what, and very much not who, is MAUD? Explicitly, MAUD stands for Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery and was unveiled by BT at the end of 2023 after research from the telco showed clear demand for live content.

Indeed, the data revealed that despite the popularity of on-demand content services, some 90% of the British public still consumed live content via television, with more than half doing so at least once a day. The content type was primarily news and sport. Furthermore, around the same percentage of viewers rated picture quality and reliability as the most important service delivery. With regards to sport in particular, viewers expressed a clear preference for picture quality and reliability in what they were watching.

As MAUD was being unveiled in 2023, Howard Watson, chief security and networks officer at BT Group, said traditional unicast technologies were inherently wasteful in terms of energy use in content delivery and wasted storage sat in BT’s server racks. He warned that as a content distributor or internet service provider, BT had no means of influence over the content providers to encourage them to deliver content in an energy- and network-efficient way.

MAUD’s basic aim is to improve the viewer experience and increase the efficiency of the complex network journey that content takes to reach them. Unlike traditional unicast delivery, MAUD technology uses multicast to group single streams into one shared stream and this integration is made completely transparent to the player application. That means content service providers don’t need to modify their customer apps to take advantage of the technology.

BT added that removing the need to select and serve millions of individual streams to viewers increases the efficiency of content delivery, but also reduces overall costs for broadcasters, content delivery networks (CDNs) and internet providers, with the potential to yield cost savings for operators as they can achieve their desired scalability without needing to expand hardware caches. Moreover, MAUD technology is said to use up to 50% less bandwidth during peak events, reducing energy consumption through the use of fewer caches. By freeing up internet capacity, MAUD is also said to deliver a higher quality of experience for live and non-live content.

Testing times

A number of major broadcasters and content companies have been trialling the technology since 2024 and major broadcasters, including the BBC, have been involved in evaluating the technology. BT has a long history of working with content partners and sees MAUD as likely to prove of great use in large-scale football events such as the forthcoming World Cup and the Euros.

Broadpeak and Edgio have been key technology partners in the development of MAUD. BT first started working with the former just over a year ago. Broadpeak provided components to create what the two firms say will be the world’s first MAUD-enabled network, including the Broadpeak nanoCDN multicast adaptive bitrate (mABR) technology, a widely deployed service across the world for video streaming. MAUD’s architecture is attributed with taking mABR one step further by integrating with content provider player applications and eliminating the need to modify customers’ apps.

Four months after this development, in August 2024, BT announced that it had taken MAUD technology from proof of concept to real-world application in its first live content delivery network (CDN) deployment with Edgio. By building on the strengths of the proposed and accepted Open Caching standards, Edgio and BT Group are confident that that they can establish the mechanisms needed to share the required information for this partnership to succeed.

The two firms have been trialling the delivery of content from the BT-owned EE TV service on select set-top boxes in a live network since 2024. In March 2025, BT revealed that MAUD had seen its first test deployment, based on real BBC Two content on an EE set-top box TV platform in the live network. It showed that during peak times on the network, the MAUD solution converted over 60% of traffic from unicast delivery to multicast delivery, demonstrating the promised ability to flatten peaks of network traffic.

“Without doubt, the demand for live content will continue and innovation will be part of the answer to deliver faster streaming, of higher quality content, to an even greater number of devices,” said Chris Bramley, managing director, NAS and architecture, networks at BT commenting in March 2025 on the trial and the results seen to date. “As millions look forward to watching the next live event, we’ll continue to innovate and collaborate with content and application providers on technologies such as MAUD, to make sure we collectively deliver the best experiences for our shared customers.”

Indeed, as regards moving to the next stage of the trial, BT Group confirmed that it was looking to broaden the scope of its work to include more channels, build out the full feature set and test the addition of dynamic advert insertion, which it assured would enable a seamless, personalised ad experience for viewers.

While development is still ongoing, what is without doubt is that BT’s work will carry on apace. Viewers’ expectation bar for live content is only rising and another peak can be expected next summer for the FIFA World Cup in the US, Canda and Mexico which will see an unprecedented number of games broadcast on an unprecedented numbers of channels. The fruits of BT’s work should light up proceedings for viewers and not its own infrastructure. That will be the ultimate goal – on the pitch and on the network.

 

 

CLEMSON, S.C. – Clemson volleyball head coach Jackie Simpson Kirr released the 2025 Atlantic Coast Conference slate on Tuesday morning.

After opening the season on the road, the Tigers will kick off conference play in Jervey Gym on Friday, Sept. 26 against Florida State before welcoming Miami (Fla.) to town on Sunday, Sept. 28.

The Tigers will hit the road for the first time in conference play when they make the swing to reigning conference champions, Pitt, on Oct. 3 and then travel to Texas to visit with SMU for the second time since the Mustangs joined the ACC in the summer of 2024.

Clemson will play home-and-home matches against Syracuse, Florida State and travel partner Georgia Tech. The program will face the other 14 league teams just once throughout the season, including welcoming Stanford and California to Jervey Gym for the first time since the two teams joined the ACC prior to last season.

The complete conference slate can be found on ClemsonTigers.com. Times and television designations for all conference matches will be release at a later date, along with the 2025 non-conference schedule.

All home matches inside Jervey Gym are free and open to the public. The Tigers are excited to welcome fans back to the newly renovated Jervey Gym, attached to the recently complete Watt Family Performance & Wellness Center.

The 2025 season will mark the first competitive season after construction was completed on the Jervey Gym Lobby, the new main entrance, located in the southeast side of the gym adjacent to Perimeter Road and catty-corner to Littlejohn Coliseum. This is a new access point for fans on match days that also features restrooms and concession areas. A premium seating option will reside on the south side of the gym on the second level known as the ACEs Club Lounge. ACEs Club Members at the highest giving tiers will be given the first opportunity to experience the ACEs Club Lounge during the 2025 regular season. Fans can learn more about access to this space by visiting IPTAYCUAD.com/Clemson-vb-aces.

For the most up-to-date information regarding Clemson Volleyball, visit ClemsonTigers.com and follow the team on X, Instagram and Facebook.

Selections released today. As expected, UCLA is the #2 seed, behind Stanford.

In the other thread, I said there were two at-large bids. Turns out there were actually three. So, both USC and Cal got at-large berths.

UCLA will open with Loyola Marymount, which I don’t really understand. LMU is ranked #9, while USC who is seeded third opens with 15th ranked Harvard. Either way, fully expect the semi finals will be UCLA-USC and Stanford vs. Hawaii or Cal.

Tournament is next week, Friday-Sunday, May 8-10 in Indianapolis. 1st round and semi finals are streamed on ncaa.com. The championship match will be on Sunday, May 10 at 9:00am, and televised on ESPNU.

Bundesliga International and telecommunications firm China Mobile Migu have committed to working together in a host of areas including the development of broadcast technology and the use of virtual reality.

The two organisations launched a joint declaration of intent yesterday in Frankfurt, formalising both sides’ commitment to strengthening their partnership across a broad range of areas.

China Mobile is one of the world’s biggest mobile coverage providers, with more than one billion customers. Bundesliga broadcast partner Migu is a wholly owned digital content subsidiary of China Mobile and the premier sports content streaming platform in China.

Bundesliga described it as a market leader in premium sports rights content, providing a “best-in-class streaming experience”.

As part of the joint declaration, Bundesliga International and China Mobile Migu will work together further in areas of media rights distribution, broadcast technology and innovations, such as the use of virtual reality, content, technology and innovation.

“The Bundesliga stands as one of the most popular leagues in the world, not least because of its efforts on and off the pitch,” said Peer Naubert, managing director and chief marketing officer of Bundesliga International.

“Bundesliga Legends such as Yang Chen and Jiayi Shao were trailblazers for football in China, but off the pitch we are creating experiences for Chinese fans that we hope last a lifetime.

“Our long-term ambition is to support the development of football in China. We are proud to share that vision and work collaboratively with China Mobile and Migu. We are excited for the future of Chinese football.”

The agreement will also look to grow football in China and further foster the Chinese football culture, with a range of marketing and club-related initiatives to bring the Bundesliga closer to Chinese football fans.

“Bundesliga is recognised as a leader in innovation and one of the world’s best football leagues, with a loyal and passionate fanbase and we believe there is a lot we can gain through our deeper cooperation,” said Wenhai Shen, chairman of China Mobile Migu.

“We hope that the partnership can help us in the further development of a healthy and sustainable football culture in China and also introduce new innovative services that can thrill and delight Chinese football fans.

“The collaboration between China Mobile Migu and the Bundesliga represents a powerhouse alliance between a leading sports platform and a world-class football league. We will leverage live broadcasting as the core to deliver comprehensive media content, drive multi-scenario smart experiences through technological innovation, and harness the synergy of ‘content + technology + integrated innovation’ to redefine the future of football engagement.”