By Erwin Boogert, Emerce. Groningen – September 9, 2026. A name from the early days of online video resurfaces with a completely new mission. StreamZilla, once a very early video CDN, is being revived by Groningen-based Jet-Stream as a fully-fledged European alternative to Vimeo.

The platform initially targets healthcare institutions, government bodies, and commercial organizations that want to maintain control over their videos without being dependent on American technology companies. It will run in a closed beta for the coming weeks, which will conclude with a public launch.

StreamZilla had become popular among major clients such as Ajax, Eyeworks, Ziggo, KLM, and Bol. For example, they could stream their video productions to internal and external audiences on any conceivable device and for a reasonable price.

StreamZilla was launched in 2003 by Jet-Stream, the Groningen-based streaming company of entrepreneur Stef van der Ziel, whose history in livestreaming dates back to 1994. The world’s first live video stream ever.

The platform grew into one of the more popular European streaming providers before being brought back under the JetStream flag in 2013 and disappearing as an independent brand. The label is starting up again on the same domain, streamzilla.eu , but now with a different starting point. Not the aorta of video streaming, but an EU-sovereign front- and back-end. A Vimeo, but affordable and as compliant with European regulations as possible.

Owner Jet-Stream is also one of the initiators of Cloud of the North, a partnership that helps northern companies and institutions move away from American cloud providers and has attracted hundreds of participating organizations since its inception, including the University of Groningen. With StreamZilla, Van der Ziel extends that same concept of sovereignty specifically to video hosting. In this category, Vimeo and YouTube have hardly any European counterparts.

StreamZilla complies with WCAG 2.2 AA for accessibility, is AVG-proof and SEAL-compliant, a set of European guidelines for digital sovereignty. The hosting runs through the Dutch Leaseweb and is positioned as green. Also new is the use of the open source Whisper model that runs locally for automatic subtitles. Video content does not need to be sent to an American cloud service for transcription. While competitors in this segment often rely heavily on enterprise compliance at the expense of ease of use, StreamZilla emphatically wants to remain simple and accessible to the end user.

The platform targets organizations with up to approximately five hundred employees and keeps the barrier to entry low. A free entry level, with paid subscriptions starting at just a few tens of euros per month.

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