In our lab, we are building something that our first customers and experts are unanimously enthusiastic about: JTS, groundbreaking new streaming platform technology. Before we show you what it is, we want to explain why Jet-Stream, above all, is the one to build it: it has everything to do with who we are, and even more with who we are not.

Thirty+ years of learning, including from what went wrong

In 1994, Jet-Stream was there at the birth of streaming. Over more than thirty years we have seen many hypes and players come storming in and blow away again, and we have run projects ranging from small to very large. Most of them went well. Some didn’t, and it is precisely those projects that taught us the most.

Every outage, and every customer with an edge use case, has made our platform better. Those lessons don’t live in a slide deck, but in our software, our infrastructure and the way we work.

Streaming is our craft, not a sideline

The difference comes down to one word: Jet-Stream is streaming. We do nothing else. Many other companies do it on the side, and it shows. They build websites and apps, or video management systems, but they lack real, in-depth streaming expertise. You can hear that in the market, too.

So they outsource that expertise: to vendors of encoders and players, and their infrastructure to the big clouds. As a result, they never build up what lies at the core of streaming: the technical stack that determines whether a stream reaches every viewer flawlessly after passing through a complex chain of different encoders, connections, transcoders, packagers, DRM, origins, CDNs, load balancers and players. As long as everything goes well, nobody notices. But when something goes wrong, suddenly everyone points at someone else.

Jet-Stream develops, builds and operates it all itself, every day: our own infrastructure, our own software, our own network. An open architecture that gives you the freedom to replace and adapt any part of the chain. That knowledge and experience therefore don’t sit with a vendor or in an AI, but with us, and with our customers too.

AI doesn’t make the difference, expertise does

Everyone uses AI these days, and that’s fine. But if you lack the core knowledge and experience yourself, you end up having AI build something you don’t really understand. It works in the demo, and then it breaks on the exceptions, the edge cases as they’re called: the old set-top box that behaves just slightly differently, the peak when thousands of viewers hit play at the same moment, the subtitle file that doesn’t quite meet the standard, jitter somewhere in the chain that makes systems flap back and forth and so cause more outages instead of preventing them. That is exactly where things go wrong in practice, and exactly where an external vendor or an AI model that doesn’t know the answer either is of no use to you.

Jet-Stream obviously uses AI as well, but on top of more than thirty years of experience, day in, day out. We master the encoders, the packagers and the pipelines ourselves, the smart optimisations that make the difference for the vast majority of viewers, and above all streaming compliance, from accessibility to privacy. AI speeds us up rather than replacing us.

Delivering instead of promising

It’s the difference between being streaming and doing streaming on the side. Between delivering and keeping your word on the one hand, and hype and empty promises on the other. A glossy roadmap is quickly made; a stream that simply works for a million viewers at nine in the evening is quite another matter. Promising, they can do.

The cobbler should stick to his last. For more than thirty years we have done exactly one thing, and we do it well.

What we’re building in our lab

JTS is not just evolution, it is revolution. All our experience comes together in something new that we are working on in our lab right now. We can’t say much about it yet, but a small group of loyal customers and experts has already had a sneak preview. Their reactions were unanimously enthusiastic:

  • “Very impressive.”
  • “This is where things are heading.”
  • “I see thirty years of experience in this.”
  • “We can’t wait for it to be ready.”

Would you like a sneak preview too?

Curious about what we’re building, and want to be among the first to see where streaming is heading? Get in touch at welcome@jet-stream.com or call +31 50 850 3300. We’d be happy to show you.

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