Television in the Netherlands turns 75 this year. Video streaming turns 32, and it started in Groningen. On 4 November 1994, the team that would later found Jet-Stream broadcast the first live video stream on the World Wide Web from the music venue Simplon. Today we watch hours of video every day on Netflix, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, and even people who still watch television increasingly do so through streaming.

It started with four viewers

A band was playing in Simplon’s upstairs bar. Gerad Harens handled the video, Rudo de Jong the computers and Stef van der Ziel the media. A Mac Performa 630 with a grabber card captured the picture from a video mixer, a script turned it into small JPEG images, and a 28.8k modem sent them to a web server. A trick using Netscape’s brand-new keep-alive feature made the browser show the latest image by itself: one, sometimes two frames per second. You can see what it looked like on 25yearsstreaming.com.

“Four viewers didn’t amount to much in terms of reach,” says Stef van der Ziel. “But it was a breakthrough: until then, you needed a broadcasting licence to share your sound and video with others.”

From radio to streaming

On 6 November 1919, Hanso Idzerda broadcast the first Dutch radio programme from The Hague: a concert. Almost exactly 75 years later, another concert went on air in Groningen, this time over the web. In between lay a century of broadcasting licences: first for radio, and from 1951 for television too. Broadcasting was reserved for the few. Streaming broke that open, because for the first time anyone with an internet connection could reach a live audience.

A stream of innovations

Jet-Stream grew out of the Simplon experiment. A few milestones from our history:

  • 1997: one of the world’s first streaming CDNs
  • 2002: streaming in Full HD
  • 2003: live mobile streaming in Europe together with Apple, and mobile television with Nozema, KPN and Vodafone
  • 2004: Europe’s first OTT video service runs on the platform, a year before YouTube and three years before Netflix started streaming
  • Later: active multi-CDN delivery for extreme scale and availability, cookieless advertising and ultra-efficient encoding

The full overview is on our history page. The story of those early years has also been captured in the short documentary Ready Set Rock ’n Roll (2019) by Alex Pitstra and Koen de Koning, winner of the Best Commissioned Film award in 2020. Watch the documentary for free.

Why independence matters now

“Being able to reach your audience freely, without barriers, is under pressure again,” says Van der Ziel. “Almost all video in Europe runs on a handful of American platforms. They track your viewers on a massive scale, train their AI on your videos, on the people you interview and on your audience’s behaviour, and then compete with you using your own data.”

American clouds and video services are also subject to foreign law and can cut off a customer in one stroke. For organisations whose core business is video, that is a business risk. For political debates, court proceedings and information during crises, it is a risk to democracy.

StreamZilla is back

That is why Jet-Stream is bringing back StreamZilla. From 2003 the brand was the market leader in video hosting in the Benelux, and it now returns as European video hosting built around three things: ease of use, quality and compliance.

  • Drop in a video and StreamZilla takes care of encoding, quality levels up to 4K, subtitles and transcripts
  • The highest level (SEAL-4) on seven of the eight objectives of the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework
  • Compliant with the GDPR and the WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standard
  • Certified green European infrastructure
  • No AI training on your media and metadata

40 organisations are already testing it in the private beta, from large companies and broadcasters to video producers, education, healthcare and government. The free private beta runs until 31 December. Sign up on streamzilla.eu.