With the recent explosion of video-based applications, and especially the ‘cloud-first’ strategies being adopted by IT departments, the cost of continued expansion of the routing infrastructure itself has come under scrutiny. The industry has responded with numerous presentations and papers for implementing ‘router offload’ using OTN or MPLS-TP, which can be leveraged to ease the continuous and growing expense of simply adding more and more routers to handle the burgeoning network load. This paper discusses how OTN and MPLS-TP can be jointly deployed to optimize IP router infrastructures.