The Video Insiders Podcast is a podcast by Mark Donnigan and Dror Gill that discusses the hottest topics on the minds of streaming video professionals. Nothing is off limits – video compression, codecs, encoding, transcoding, workflows, technology trends and business models.

Stef van der Ziel, Jet-Stream founder and streaming pioneer, was invited to be a guest with the Video Insiders Podcast and shared his insights into streaming technology and the industry.

Listen to Episode 85 “Streaming Rocks!”

Prefer to read? Here are the highlights:

Dror: You go to NAB or IBC, you see so many vendors, some of them local, some of them international. Everyone’s marketing messages are the same. So how do you differentiate your platform from the other offerings out there?

Stef: Yeah, it’s becoming very crowded in the industry and everyone is doing the same basically. And that’s going to be an issue. And I think, there will be some consolidation. We already see that companies are going smaller because they cannot make up for the promises they had to their investors. But we are not an investor-backed company. We just started with zero and started making our own money and started to grow and grow. Some years we make money, some other years we invest the money back into new features and into growth. Especially last year we did a lot of deep investments ourselves. One of the things we differentiate with is that we build our own cloud infrastructure. It’s Docker and Kubernetes based, but it doesn’t use any virtualization and it’s purely tuned for streaming and it has a few benefits…

Mark: Our usual question is what codecs are you supporting?

Stef: Our current platform is built to support H.264 video and ACC audio, either one. The default transcoding service is based on FFmpeg, so basically, everything that FFmpeg can decode and encode, we can do it as well.

Mark: When you’re building a platform, it’s always just one more feature to add, one more codec to support… How do you make these trade-offs?

Stef: We have a philosophy in the company, and we call this Easy, Smart, Expert. We apply this philosophy at every step in the process… To make it easy, we just filter away all the technology, just click and start streaming, and that’s it. If you want to do it smarter, you can fiddle around and customize it without having to have any developing experience. And then, as an expert, you can build a workflow in a few minutes instead of building it in months on other platforms.

Dror: I think that’s a very interesting philosophy that you’re presenting. You have some standard way of streaming that you’ve developed and you have a basic set of features. Do you want more? Don’t come and ask me for more. You can do it yourself on the side and then plug it back into my platform and enjoy all the benefits your service can give. 

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