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Every September the RAI fills up with streaming vendors. Hundreds of expensive stands, a lot of buzzwords, a smooth pitch and, with a bit of luck, a demo that actually works.

This year’s buzzword is digital sovereignty. Rightly so. Jet-Stream pioneered it, and we welcome every vendor that is serious about independence, sustainability and protecting your data, your business and your customers.

But greenwashing now has two siblings: privacy-washing and sovereignty-washing. The stand will not tell you who sees your data, under which law, what a viewer really costs you, or whether you can ever leave. You have to ask.

These are the ten questions we would ask. Take them with you. A good vendor answers without hesitating. A weak one changes the subject.

1. Which jurisdiction does my data fall under?

The usual question is “where are your servers?” It is the wrong question. A data centre in Frankfurt or Amsterdam says nothing about who can compel access. What matters is which law governs the company that controls the data.

A US parent company is subject to the CLOUD Act wherever the hardware sits, and so are its European subsidiaries. So do not ask about location. Ask about the legal chain: who is the processor, who is the parent, and which law governs them. “Hosted in Europe” is not sovereignty if the parent answers to Washington.

Then ask the same question for the entire stack: metadata, analytics, storage, delivery. Plenty of European platforms run their own software but deliver video through an American network. Or the other way round. Either way the sovereignty is theoretical.

2. Who are your sub-processors?

A streaming platform is layers: encoding, storage, CDN, DNS, player, analytics, monitoring, support tooling. Behind every layer there may be another company. You sign one contract. Your data travels through ten.

Ask for the complete list of sub-processors, as it should appear in the data processing agreement, not a summary. Pay attention to the ones that usually go missing: the analytics provider, the error reporting inside the player, the chat widget on the support desk, and the AI your data is pushed through.

“We will look that up for you” is an answer in itself.

3. What is your SEAL score?

The European Commission’s EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework is the first common yardstick for digital sovereignty. It assesses cloud services on eight objectives, from strategic and legal sovereignty to operational and environmental, and rates each from 0 to 4: the SEAL level.

This is the first IBC where you can ask this question. Ask for the score per objective, not the average. An average of 3 can mean everything is in order, or that one objective fails badly and the others hide it. Then ask for the evidence behind each score.

If the vendor has never heard of SEAL, sovereignty is not a topic for them, whatever the banner says.

4. Is your player WCAG 2.2 AA?

The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025. Public bodies were already obliged to be accessible; now many commercial services are too. A player that cannot be operated by keyboard, does not support subtitles or fails on contrast puts your organisation in breach.

Do not ask whether the player is accessible. Everyone says yes. Ask for the accessibility report or conformance statement, and ask who wrote it.

5. What is your energy mix, and what does one viewing hour cost?

Video is one of the biggest power consumers on the internet. “Do you run on green energy?” is now a standard question with a standard yes. Go further. Ask for the certificates.

The real footprint of streaming is in the efficiency of the chain. Hardware or software encoding? How many renditions, and are they all needed? Where are segments cached and how often is the same file delivered twice? A vendor in control of this can express it as energy or CO2 per streamed hour. Ask for that number.

6. Is your HLS Apple-compliant?

HLS is the standard almost all video is delivered in. Apple maintains the specification and publishes a free validator that shows exactly where a stream deviates. Most vendors do not run it.

The result is streams that look fine on a laptop but stutter, load slowly or stall on quality switches on iPhone and Apple TV. The viewer blames the platform, the platform blames the vendor, the vendor blames the network. Meanwhile your storage and traffic bill climbs, because a non-compliant stream is usually an inefficient one. That cheap price per gigabyte gets expensive when the gigabytes are unnecessary.

Ask whether they run the validator on production streams and what comes out. Ask an engineer, not a salesperson. Then ask whether the packager follows industry best practices. A packager that dictates timing to the rest of the chain, instead of adapting to it, breaks the moment you plug in another encoder. That is not a technical detail. It is lock-in to their encoder.

7. Which trackers are in your player?

You do not have to ask this one. You can see it. During a demo, open the network tab of your browser and watch which domains are called when the player loads and plays. Every request to a domain that is not the vendor’s deserves a question.

A video player needs no cookies to play video. If it needs a cookie banner, something more than playback is happening. Viewing statistics can be collected server-side, not shared with any third party.

8. How do I get out?

Everyone talks about onboarding. Nobody talks about offboarding. Yet the exit is the real test of every promise: a vendor confident in its service makes leaving easy.

Be specific. In which format do I get my content, metadata and viewing data back? Within what timeframe? At what cost? Does the service keep running during migration? And is all of this in the contract, or is it a verbal assurance?

Ask for the exit clause before you sign, not after. And look at how open the platform really is. Can you compose the pipeline yourself, break out of it, and swap components for your own or someone else’s? Sovereignty does not end at “hosted in Europe, owned in Europe”. It is about openness, transparency, control and freedom.

9. What does it cost per view?

Streaming price lists are rarely comparable. One vendor charges per seat, another per gigabyte, a third per minute of storage plus a share of your revenue. On top come the costs that are never on the list: cloud egress, transcoding minutes, extra renditions, player licences.

One question levels all of it: what does one viewer watching for half an hour cost me, all in? Encoding, storage, CDN, egress, player, support. A vendor who knows their own cost structure works it out in a minute. If they cannot, you will not be able to either.

10. Who is watching along?

The last question is the most direct, which is exactly why so few people ask it. Who has access to my content and my viewing data? The vendor? Their cloud provider? Advertising partners? Governments outside the EU? Who owns my media, my metadata, my logs and my analytics? Is my data used to train AI?

Ask it in exactly those words. A good answer is short and complete. A bad answer is long and about encryption.

Finally

None of these questions is about features. Features are what the demo shows. These ten questions are about what the demo does not show, but what you will notice three years from now.

No clear answer to one of them? You know enough. Clear answers to all ten? You have probably found a good vendor.

Good luck, and enjoy IBC.

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