Jet-Stream brings StreamZilla back as the sovereign European alternative to Vimeo. A conversation with founders Heino Bosma and Stef van der Ziel about 32 years of pioneering, seven years of digital sovereignty, and why “EU hosted” is not enough.

Groningen, September 2026. In an office on the Hoge der A, a stone’s throw from the spot where the first Dutch livestream went out into the world in 1994, sit two men who want to hold up a mirror to the video hosting market. Stef van der Ziel founded Jet-Stream when streaming barely existed. Heino Bosma walked in with an idea earlier this year. The result is called StreamZilla, a name that veterans of the European internet scene will recognise.

First, the danger: why sovereignty?

Stef, you have been saying for years that digital sovereignty matters. Why, exactly?

Stef: “Because the risks are concrete, not theoretical. I will name three. First, data loss: a service can suddenly be discontinued, an account blocked, and your video archive with ten years of carefully built metadata is gone in one go. Your customers’ core business collapses, and so does yours. Second, data theft, or to put it more politely: access to your data by parties you never gave permission to. The CLOUD Act gives US authorities access to data held by American companies, even when that data physically sits in Frankfurt or Amsterdam. On top of that, there is the danger of AI systems being trained on your data, after which you find yourself competing against your own data. And third, what I call sudden death: a supplier that has to shut down the service overnight, gets acquired, or leaves the market under political pressure. Anyone who has built their business-critical video communication on that falls over.”

That sounds like a risk analysis. Is that where this comes from?

Stef: “No, and that is exactly the point. For us it is not a risk, it is a core value. In 1994 we published our first livestream. Back then, broadcasters and cable operators decided who was allowed to transmit. We broke through that with streaming: suddenly anyone with a story could reach an audience without permission from some gatekeeper. Thirty years later we see that freedom under pressure again, except that the gatekeepers are now big platforms and foreign jurisdictions. For us, digital sovereignty is the same movement as back then, only now they block you with different means. That is why it feels so strange to us when parties treat it merely as a formal compliance exercise.”

Seven years ahead

Jet-Stream was already investing in digital sovereignty in 2019. That was well before the topic became political.

Stef: “In 2019 we saw how dependent the European media sector was becoming on a handful of American clouds and SaaS services. We deliberately chose to keep our entire chain in our own hands: our own encoders and packagers, our own platform, European hosting with a partner we have been with since 2004, and no critical dependencies on software or services outside European jurisdiction. We always had an anti-cloud policy. So we do not suddenly have to migrate or rebuild anything now. We have already been through that whole process, where others still have to start. That makes a difference you only see when you dig deeper. It begins with awareness, then policy, and then actually following through, down to every detail.”

Does that deliver anything beyond a principle?

Stef: “Yes and no. In 2024 we won the Dutch Privacy Award. For us that was not just recognition, but above all proof of something we have been saying for years: privacy, sovereignty, cost savings and supporting your customers’ business can go hand in hand. Take advertising. That entire industry hangs on trackers and cookies. We pioneered contextual advertising: advertising based on the content of the video rather than on tracking the viewer. It is privacy-friendly, it works without consent banners, and it even earns publishers more money, because you can serve every viewer a relevant ad instead of only two thirds of them. So sovereignty does not have to come at the expense of your revenue model. It can even add a new one. Even so, the market was slow to pick it up until last year. Until the US became more aggressive in its international data policy. Now you see that sovereignty is hot, but many parties are struggling. That is why we co-founded a club of organisations working on digital sovereignty, and this Cloud of the North community now has more than 450 members, the largest in the country, I believe. In a digitally sovereign, closed environment the members share knowledge, experience and techniques, and that is extremely valuable.”

Beyond “EU owned, EU hosted”

What do you yourselves understand by digital sovereignty? Everyone uses the term these days.

Stef: “For many parties it stops at two checkboxes: European ownership and European hosting. That is absolutely insufficient, because European hosting that relies on American suppliers is still within a foreign sphere of influence. We go much further. You have to host with a European party without any American legal link. Or better still, host it yourself, as we do, on your own infrastructure. It has to show in every technical choice. Let me give a few examples. We build open pipelines: customers can assemble their own workflow from a mix of components, ours or others’, so they are not trapped in a black box. We use AI for subtitling and translation, but within our own cloud, so no video material or transcript goes to a third party, let alone an American AI service. We explicitly lay down that data, metadata and logs are and remain the property of the customer, and that the customer can take them along. And for analytics we do not use trackers in the browser but measure server side, and that data is not shared with any third party. You will find that list at very few other parties, and certainly not all of it at once.”

StreamZilla: from idea to platform

Heino, you came up with the idea of reviving StreamZilla. How did that go?

Heino: “I saw a gap opening up in the market: organisations in government, healthcare, education and the business sector are looking for a simple place to upload, manage and publish video, but the well-known services can barely, if at all, demonstrate that they meet what European organisations now have to demand. I brought that idea to Stef and it clicked immediately, because it fits exactly with what Jet-Stream has been building on for seven years. In 2003 StreamZilla was a Jet-Stream video hosting service that quickly became market leader in the Benelux and then grew rapidly across Europe, before it was absorbed into Jet-Stream. That name and that DNA were still there.”

How did you approach it?

Heino: “We built StreamZilla from the ground up on compliance and on the core values Stef just described, not as a formal layer on top but as the foundation. Technical compliance, with high-quality encoding and packaging based on 32 years of streaming experience. Green compliance, with certified sustainable hosting. GDPR compliance, with data minimisation and customer ownership of data as the starting point. EAA and WCAG compliance, so that video is accessible, with automatic subtitling and translation. AI, but secure within our own cloud. Cybersecurity, with an organisation that works according to ISO 27001. And then the sovereignty score itself: we are aiming for the highest SEAL score in the market, and we already score very high on it today. Every choice was made with that conviction, and that makes it different from certifying something after the fact. At Jet-Stream, sovereign, sustainable and private also interlock. For example, by using server-side logs for analytics we save the data that trackers would generate, and it is also far less privacy-sensitive. The logs remain the customer’s, safe on our own infrastructure, which is much more energy-efficient than the hardware that clouds run, which runs on fossil power, while we run on certified green power. That is the difference between standing fundamentally for these principles and thinking deeply about your entire stack, or trying to squeeze through tender requirements for form’s sake.”

What will a customer actually be able to do with it?

Heino: “Upload, manage and publish, as simply as possible. Up to 4K, scalable to millions of viewers, automatic subtitles and translations, a player and pages in your own branding, embed wherever you like. Multi-tenancy, password protection on the overview page and per video, searchable transcripts. And customers can choose: an account on our own European infrastructure, or license StreamZilla and host it themselves. For some government bodies and healthcare institutions the latter is the only acceptable form, so we simply offer it. For education we are working on LTI integrations with learning environments, browser-based recording and bulk import from Kaltura, Vimeo and YouTube, so that switching does not become a months-long project.”

Not an alternative, but the alternative

You call StreamZilla “the” alternative to Vimeo. That is a bold claim.

Heino: “Deliberately so. There are countless video hosting services and most are not compliant, or only barely or poorly. They are American, or the European ones still run on American clouds, or they send your transcripts to American AI services, or they are riddled with trackers. For a videomaker who just wants to share a showreel, that may be fine. For a municipality, a hospital, a university or a company with a procurement department that asks questions, it is not. For that group there is no fully-fledged alternative in Europe that ticks all the boxes at once and is also built by people with three decades of streaming expertise. That is StreamZilla.”

Stef, you are visibly irritated by part of the market. By what, exactly?

Stef: “By parties that for years were too lazy to pay serious attention to sovereignty and privacy, now see they might lose business, and are suddenly supposedly in favour of sovereignty. They put a European flag on the website, claim compliance and meanwhile make a mockery of their customers. Because if you take a quick look at their service yourself, it turns out that critical parts of it simply run on American clouds and American software, precisely the parts where viewers’ personal data is collected and where their customer data lives. The fact that the data centre is in the EU changes nothing: jurisdiction follows the supplier, not the location of the servers. That is not enough, and they know it. Misleading customers on a subject that concerns their own data and continuity, that is something I have trouble with. Not only because we do invest fundamentally in compliance, but also because they get in the way of the higher goal, namely reducing their customers’ dependency and safeguarding viewers’ privacy. It is too opportunistic and harmful. We call this sovereignty-washing, and parties also engage in greenwashing and privacy-washing. That is why we run benchmarks, share hard measurable facts, sometimes behind the scenes and sometimes publicly, and also educate the market with knowledge and teach it to ask the right questions. We want to set the example as a party that not only masters streaming technology at a high level, but also wants to do right by our customers, the viewers and the planet.”

What is your advice to organisations that have to make a choice now?

Stef: “First, make sure the organisation is aware of the risks and the necessity, from the supervisory board to the shop floor. Let procurement dig deeper. Dig deeper yourself too, and make parties come with evidence. Not a marketing page, but a completed sovereignty assessment with proof, a list of all sub-processors, an honest answer to the question of where data and AI processing take place, an explanation of how analytics are measured, and a demonstrable exit strategy for your data. Whoever cannot deliver that is not a reliable partner. Jet-Stream and StreamZilla have all of that ready. We have worked on it for seven years, so we have no problem putting it on the table.”

What next

What comes after the launch?

Heino: “For StreamZilla we are starting with a closed beta with a limited number of invited customers as testers, and working towards general availability in the first quarter of 2027. Anyone who wants to take part can sign up via streamzilla.eu.”

Stef: “In 1994 people thought streaming was a toy, and in 2019 people thought sovereignty was a hobby. We are used to the market catching up a few years later. This time we have a seven-year head start and a platform that proves it. And as always, we happily keep on pioneering, and there is a lot more in the pipeline.”

StreamZilla is a spinout of Jet-Stream, Groningen. More information: streamzilla.eu and jet-stream.com.

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