Today marks a special milestone: exactly 22 years ago Jet-Stream was founded. Since 2003, our customers have trusted us to deliver streaming services that are reliable, scalable, and innovative. On this anniversary, we want to thank all our customers and partners for their trust, and highlight a few of the innovations that have shaped Jet-Stream into what it is today.

We are proud to highlight three of our many industry-first innovations:

Airflow MultiCDN: Scale, Cost Control and Reliability

Distributing video and live streams at scale is a challenge. Most providers rely on a single Content Delivery Network (CDN). Jet-Stream took a different approach more than ten years ago when we launched Airflow MultiCDN, a breakthrough technology that integrates multiple global CDNs into a single intelligent service.

Airflow does not passively point users to one CDN. Instead, its built-in algorithm actively analyses every viewer in real time and routes them to the most optimal CDN – based on proximity, performance, availability, and cost – all within milliseconds.

If a CDN is unavailable or experiences performance issues, Airflow instantly switches to an alternative, guaranteeing uptime and viewer satisfaction. Even mid-stream, players can return to Airflow for updated recommendations.

What makes Airflow unique is its flexibility:

  • Customers can mix their own CDN contracts with Jet-Stream’s.
  • Routing policies can be overridden per video, per livestream, or even dynamically via API.
  • Regional optimization ensures the best performance-to-cost ratio in each country or continent.
  • 100% EU-sovereign CDN routing is available for GDPR-compliant operations.

For over a decade, Airflow has saved customers significant traffic costs while maximizing scalability and availability with uptimes between 99.995 and 100%. And it’s included, free of charge, in every Jet-Stream Cloud account.

StreamStats: Privacy-Friendly Realtime Analytics

Professional content providers need to know how their videos and streams perform: what content is popular, when and where audiences are watching, how much traffic is consumed, and how well the infrastructure is performing.

Traditional analytics solutions rely on trackers inside players. These come with challenges: additional costs, incomplete data, manipulation risks, and privacy concerns—especially when data is processed in non-EU SaaS platforms.

Jet-Stream pioneered an alternative. Back in 2004 we launched StreamStats, and 2023 it saw its latest complete redesign from the ground up. StreamStats processes raw log streams from all servers and CDNs in real time, converting massive amounts of log data into lightweight viewer sessions. This reduces data volumes by a factor of 10,000, saving energy and processing power.

The result is a realtime interactive dashboard that offers both a high-level overview and detailed drill-down per title. Customers also have full API access, enabling advanced analytics and integrations on their own systems.

StreamStats helps customers cut costs on third-party analytics, while staying 100% GDPR compliant and significantly greener thanks to its data optimization. And like Airflow, it comes free with every Jet-Stream Cloud account.

MaelStrom: The Green Revolution in Live Encoding

Live video encoding is one of the most compute-intensive processes on the internet. It is what makes studio signals and event feeds suitable for streaming, across multiple qualities and devices, without buffering.

Jet-Stream’s MaelStrom is a disruptive innovation in live encoding. By applying hardware acceleration, it reduces energy consumption by an astonishing 89%. But that’s just the beginning.

MaelStrom is a cloud-native environment that automatically load balances channels across accelerators and servers. Its robust decoding engine can handle unstable source signals, delivering stable, high-quality streams. Integration with multiple packagers makes it one of the most scalable and reliable encoding solutions available today.

Extensive built-in input and output analytics give customers deep insight into how signals are processed, making transcoding not just greener and cheaper, but also more transparent. With ARM optimizations, MaelStrom stands out as the most sustainable and cost-effective live encoding solution on the market.

22 Years of Trust and Innovation

From Airflow to StreamStats to MaelStrom, Jet-Stream has consistently shown that cost savings, automation, privacy protection, and sustainability can go hand in hand.

For 22 years we have been proud to innovate in the streaming industry, helping customers deliver better experiences to their audiences. And we’re not stopping here—Jet-Stream will continue to push boundaries, building the next generation of streaming technology with you.

Go back to see all blogposts