By CEO Stef van der Ziel

Sustainability and data protection are important topics in our industry, but I’d like to add a third agenda there: bringing people together rather than polarizing them.

Streaming vendors in trouble.

2023 was a special year for streaming. On the one hand, we saw companies struggling, laying off people, downsizing, or even shutting down operations. With sometimes dire consequences for their customers, who were forced to put money, time and focus into migrations rather than innovation and business.

On-prem, souvereign cloud.

We have been around for quite a few years (in 2024 we will celebrate 30 years of streaming!) and for that reason have built our service on a mix of vendors, and run our own cloud. This makes us much less vulnerable to such storms in the vendor landscape. We also developed MaelStrom DeepEdge, an on-prem solution so that customers can have more control over their own encoding, transcoding, origination, and packaging and thus become less dependent. These are trends that we are definitely going to see for 2024 and beyond, and we and our CDN partners are already ready for them.

Data protection and privacy.

We are excited that data protection and sustainability are gaining traction. Our industry is starting to be more mindful of the relevance of their data, and protecting it, and also protecting their viewers. There is also more concern for the planet, and plenty of work is being done to green our industry.

Driving role.

These are topics that we, as a pioneer and innovator, have put on the agenda, and also invested heavily in, and which other pioneers are now fully committed to. Jet-Stream is the first 100% EU sovereign cloud that guarantees data protection. And we have been 100% green for years. Recent investments in our cloud have radically reduced our storage, server and transcoding footprint. Algorithms automatically scale capacity up and down based on demand.

The impact of video and streaming.

Video and audio are by far the most powerful media for conveying knowledge and creativity. Streaming is an amazing invention that instantaneously spreads these media, knowledge and creativity around the world. I am extremely proud to have been at the foot of that development, and the journey from 1994 to 2024 and has been a dream.

Connecting people.

So video, audio and streaming have everything to spread knowledge, to inspire people, to learn from each other and to connect people. These techniques have revolutionized the world in 30 years. From online video training to deep insight sharing, to disruptively changing music, film, entertainment and sports, and from happy and funny cat videos to live meetings. These technologies have everything to democratize the world, and bring people even closer together.

Negative effects.

Video, audio and streaming are ironclad technologies. Unfortunately, they are also abused. For example, to spread disinformation. Of course, it’s cool that people watch online video as much as 4 hours a day these days. But algorithms of OTT platforms and especially social video platforms – with their endless scrolling – also lead to addictions, even lower levels of knowledge and poorer literacy among youth. And those same algorithms thus divide people. 

Polarization.

Through algorithms of video platforms like Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, people are quickly sucked into “rabbit holes” with “confirmation bias” that can quickly pull their relatively average opinions to the extreme. In Covid times this has become much stronger. And people are unfortunately too often pitted against each other, which is the opposite of what we want to achieve with video and streaming.

Jet-Stream Mission

For the above reason, we have sharpened our mission:

Since we invented live video streaming, Jet-Stream stands for streaming audio and video to inspire people, to make the world smarter and more creative, to bring people closer together and for organizations to have sustainable revenue models for sharing their knowledge and creativity.

This is also a call to our industry to make sure that with all the cool AI developments we will be diving into in the coming years, we keep these core values at the forefront. These are ours:

Jet-Stream Core values

People

Humanity can sometimes be divided. Streaming democratizes and ensures that knowledge and creativity can be spread freely over the Internet. Jet-Stream works on innovations and services that protect privacy, improve freedoms for all, and bring people closer together.

Planet

Streaming saves a lot of travel time but also costs energy. Jet-Stream is a leader and innovator in using renewable energy and in reducing the footprint of digital audio and video.

Profit

There is great value in knowledge and creativity. Thanks to Jet-Stream, organizations can share their knowledge and creativity with the whole world through streaming and make money from it. Our innovations, core values and services are Jet-Stream’s sustainable revenue model.

Happy holidays with your nearest and dearest.

Stef.

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