By Stef van der Ziel, founder of Jet-Stream

A recent post about the DPP platform cost benchmark asked why Europe hasn’t built a shared streaming technology stack by now, and answered its own question: ego and control.

Correct. But incomplete. Because the honest answer is that Europe has built that technology stack. Repeatedly. The technology worked every time. What failed, every time, was something much simpler and much harder: the willingness to let the other party win too.

Here is the history, not as a list of credits, but as a pattern worth learning from.

1994: Four viewers

The first livestream on the web, from the Netherlands, had an audience of four people. From there, growth went exponential, and everything that follows is a direct consequence of that curve.

1996: One stream, one bottleneck, one national outage

A live event attracted far more viewers than the infrastructure could handle. Everything ran from central servers, and that single choke point didn’t just kill the stream. It congested an entire ISP and rippled through the Dutch internet.

The lesson was obvious and it was learned early: centralized streaming does not scale. Distribution has to be… distributed, and that means it has to be shared.

1997: The first streaming CDN was a joint effort

The answer, built for a single event, was arguably the first streaming CDN in the world. And it was federated from day one: streaming servers inside multiple ISP networks, central load balancing with active redirects. No bottleneck. The AMS-IX relieved instead of hammered. Traffic stayed close to the viewers.

The interesting part isn’t who built it. It’s that it only worked because several ISPs opened their networks to a shared piece of infrastructure. Nobody owned it alone. That was the whole point.

2000: It works. Now let’s argue about who pays whom.

In 2000 this became permanent: StreamGate, a national federated CDN. Dutchview, Jet-Stream, several ISPs and several Dutch broadcasters worked together. Edge servers inside ISP networks, an active central load balancer on top. Hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers. Backbones and the AMS-IX offloaded. Public money that would otherwise have gone to Akamai, kept in the Netherlands.

Technically a resounding success. Then it had to be formalized, and the cooperation fell apart on a question that should have been trivial: who gets to benefit?

The ISPs’ wholesale departments wanted to charge for traffic that originated inside their own networks and served their own subscribers, in other words, to be paid for being saved money. The public broadcaster didn’t want to pay for anything, even though it was saving a fortune, so the commercial broadcasters wouldn’t either. The AMS-IX was proposed as a neutral governing body. Even neutrality couldn’t rescue it.

Everybody won. Nobody could accept that everybody else was winning as well.

The technology lived on commercially as VideoExchange and grew fast, which proves the model was sound. But the shared, national, sovereign version died in a meeting room.

The standards effort: how to kill a standard with paperwork

Broadcasters and telcos then asked the industry to standardize CDN federation. Several parties with real production experience joined in good faith. Large vendors joined too, and brought patents, on concepts that others had been running in production for years.

Trust evaporated, independence went overboard, and CDN federation standardization quietly died. A standard captured by a few vendors is not a standard. It’s a moat with paperwork. And it’s what happens when participants show up to protect a position rather than to build something together.

The warning nobody acted on

Some years later, at the Mediapark Jaarcongres, the Dutch media sector was told, in plain terms: Netflix is already here. While you watch each other’s market share, they are coming for the whole market, and to them the Netherlands is a small battlefield. Stop competing with each other. We have world-class connectivity, we have the technology, we can build large CDNs with European telcos. We can take on the world together, but only together, and only now.

There was warm applause. There was nothing else. Everyone went back to watching each other, and OTT took the market exactly as predicted.

That wasn’t a technology failure either. It was a room full of people who agreed, and who each waited for someone else to move first.

The EBU: the closest Europe ever came

Then came the real opportunity. Multi-CDN technology had matured: European-owned capacity could be deployed inside European networks and blended with commercial CDNs, steadily growing European control. Technology alone doesn’t shift a market, though. You need bundled purchasing power. The EBU brought exactly that: European broadcasters, aggregated demand, shared interest.

For a moment, everything aligned. European technology, a European tender, European demand. Sovereignty over streaming distribution, within reach.

Then the multi-year contract was reopened. Ownership was demanded of parts of the technology partner’s own IP. A parallel track appeared with another supplier, which couldn’t deliver, was sold within a year, and took the project down with it. And a core algorithm, shared under strict NDA as the crown jewel of the platform, was later published by the EBU as its own work.

I’ll leave the personal frustration out of it, because the lesson is bigger than one company. Europe had the technology, the demand and the money in one place. What it didn’t have was a governance model in which partners could trust each other. And even with the algorithm openly published and all of Europe’s aggregated demand behind it, no European multi-CDN got built.

That is the whole story in one episode: the ingredients were all there. The generosity wasn’t.

The pattern, for those keeping score

1997 and 2000: federation works technically, dies because partners want to charge each other for saving each other money.
Standardization: dies because some participants come to capture rather than to contribute.
The strategic warning: applauded, filed, forgotten, because nobody wants to be the first to give something up.
The EBU: technology and purchasing power finally aligned, undone by an IP grab and a lack of trust, and it still failed even with the answers on the table.

So when someone asks “why hasn’t Europe built a pan-European stack by now?”, the answer is not a technology gap. Europe has built this capability again and again. Europe has also dismantled it again and again, from the inside, every time it started to work, because at the decisive moment someone decided that their own slice mattered more than the shared pie.

Netflix didn’t beat Europe on technology. Europe had the technology first. Netflix beat Europe because it never had to negotiate with itself.

Why this time can be different

The question “would you move your stack onto someone else’s?” assumes the choice is between my stack and your stack. That framing is exactly what killed every attempt above. Everyone protects their own hub, their sunk cost, their control.

There is a third model, the one that worked in 1997: federation. Not one party’s platform absorbing the others, but shared, sovereign infrastructure with clear governance, where nobody has to hand their crown jewels to a competitor and everybody visibly gains. The technology is mature. The economics, as the DPP benchmark shows, are overwhelmingly in favor.

And something has fundamentally changed. Europe is finally realizing how dependent it has become on American infrastructure. What was a niche concern fifteen years ago is now on the agenda of governments, broadcasters and enterprises across the continent. The insight is landing that by working together, Europe can build a stronger, more sovereign and more robust internet than any single country or company can alone.

The awareness is there. The urgency is there. The technology has been there all along.

What’s still missing is the one thing that has been missing since 2000: the willingness to let a partner profit from your contribution, and to trust that they’ll let you profit from theirs. Call it what it is: granting each other the win, a shared win.

After thirty years, the conclusion is simple. The next attempt shouldn’t start with technology, and it certainly shouldn’t start with a committee. It should start with governance that makes defection unattractive, protects the IP of whoever brings the innovation, and makes cooperation more profitable than going it alone, from day one. Get that right, and the stack is the easy part.

Europe has built it four times. It knows how. The only thing it still has to learn is how to keep it.

Stef van der Ziel is founder and director of Jet-Stream, streaming pioneers since 1994, operating sovereign European streaming infrastructure from the Netherlands.

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