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 configured to be GDPR-compliant, and is SEAL-certified, a European mark of digital sovereignty. Hosting is provided by the Dutch company Leaseweb, which is positioned as green. Furthermore, a new feature is the use of the open-source Whisper model, which runs locally for automatic subtitling. Video content does not need to be sent to American cloud services for transcription. While competitors in this segment often rely heavily on enterprise compliance at the expense of ease of use, StreamZilla explicitly aims 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.

Go back to see all blogposts