[giantrobot]

> What can be done, at scale, to get us back to the “live” normally experienced with cable or satellite?

Stick with satellite distribution? You're going to have a devil of a time scaling any sort of real-time streaming over an IP network. Every hop adds some latency and scaling pretty much requires some non-zero amount of buffering.

IP Multicast might help but you have to sacrifice bandwidth for the multicast streams and have support all down the line for QoS. It's a hard problem which is why no one has cracked it yet. You need a setup with real-time capability from network ingest, through peering connections, all the way down to end-user terminals.