Broadpeak CEO on 15 Years of Streaming at Scale – and what comes next for the Video Industry
Broadpeak has been in the streaming business for 15 years. What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about what it takes for streaming companies to be successful?
Nobody can do it on their own. Making streaming deliver on its promise requires non-stop collaboration – between content providers, telcos, and the vendors that help drive technology forward. More often than not, the truly pivotal moments over the past fifteen years have come from a collaborative mindset, a willingness to invest in innovation, and an obsession with better audience experiences.
We’ve seen streaming evolve from basic desktop players into the dominant way people watch TV – always available, anywhere, anytime. That makes two simple pillars fundamental today: scale and monetization. Streaming tech has made it easier to bring content to the biggest audience. But what really matters is being able to do that cost-effectively, more sustainably, and with a compelling revenue proposition.
Going back to where it all started – what inspired you to found the company?
We started Broadpeak in 2010 with a clear vision that streaming would become the primary way people consume TV. It was the year of the iPad, connected devices were becoming more common, and Netflix was just beginning its international expansion. But the direction of travel was pretty clear.
We spun out of Technicolor (now Vantiva) with a team of six, and a vision that streaming video delivery would become universal. From day one, we wanted to help operators transition from legacy TV systems to OTT streaming. We believed in the move toward TV anywhere, bet on it with our time and R&D, and built lasting relationships working with pioneering pay-TV players in Europe, Asia, and then across the Americas. That belief still drives us. Today, we work with world-leading streaming platforms and telcos that bring content to over 250 million people across 50 countries. The goal is to help them drive cost savings, secure revenues, and unlock new monetization capabilities that really move the needle.
Streaming has come a long way since then. What have been the most pivotal moments for Broadpeak and your customers along the way?
Our customers have championed us in incredible ways and delivered industry-changing innovation. Bouygues Telecom was ahead of the curve in working with us to enable TV everywhere, with pause and resume across devices. Then came multicast ABR (m-ABR), which we introduced in 2012 as a more scalable way to stream video to massive audiences. We had been warning for years that traditional streaming would hit a wall, especially for live events, and now the industry is seeing that play out. Early adopters of our nanoCDN m-ABR solution like Orange, and TIM have helped us scale the technology across millions of devices. Partners like DAZN and BT Group have also demonstrated how to use m-ABR to handle massive network traffic during high-scale streaming, all while giving viewers the best quality of experience (QoE).
After the launch of our SaaS-based cloud platform, broadpeak.io – another key milestone for us – our customers doubled down on innovation in ad monetization. Alongside recent deployments with Chunghwa Telecom, Media Prima and RMC-BFM, TF1 has been one of our closest partnerships, enabling spot-level replacement for the first time in a live addressable TV service using our server-side ad insertion (SSAI) solution, setting new benchmarks in targeted advertising.
Tell us about the people behind those innovations. What makes Broadpeak tick?
We’re video specialists. We have incredibly talented engineers and skilled teams who have spent their whole careers in video delivery and streaming. Many of them have grown with us all the way from day one. There’s a culture of transparency and trust that runs deep in everything we do, from customer support, measurement and analytics, right down to financial performance as a publicly listed company.
Streaming at scale is the top challenge for platforms right now. How are you helping deliver video to the biggest audiences?
Traditional streaming infrastructure can’t keep up with consumer demand and the huge traffic spikes we see during major live events. Just look at how unicast delivery struggled to cope during Netflix’s Paul vs. Tyson fight last year, causing delays and freezes across devices. We help customers solve these issues through high-performance caching, streaming optimization and that reduce costs, energy requirements and network traffic by 90% – all while improving the viewer experience.
Our new solution EdgePeak is also important to how we help customers today. It’s designed to allow operators to extend or build their own CDN capacity with unmatched energy efficiency and security features. Anti-piracy is top of mind for our customers too – rights holders need more sophisticated, multi-layered security measures to fight growing piracy threats. We’ve embedded real-time anti-piracy tools into our CDN that go beyond base-level token validation to protect against illegal streaming and secure maximum revenues.
What’s changing in ad tech? Where are your customers innovating in streaming monetization?
Dynamic ad insertion has become essential, but innovation is moving beyond ad replacement as content providers look for higher inventory value – and brands ask for better measurement. Alongside new formats like L-Banners for seamless in-stream monetization, we’ve developed a game-changing new solution for interactive, shoppable ads, Click2. It’s an intuitive, push-to-mobile approach that lets viewers click on ads and receive a purchase prompt on their mobiles – much more effective than a QR code, and easier to scale in a fragmented device ecosystem. If streamers want to compete for ad dollars with digital-native giants like YouTube and Meta, shoppability is a must. Many of our customers are already taking the front foot and deploying shoppable formats today.
What comes next for the streaming industry?
Streaming technology needs to work smarter, not harder. The surge in live streamed events is a huge opportunity for rights holders and broadband service providers, but it’s also their biggest challenge – and a wake up call for the industry’s carbon footprint. We’ve committed
to reducing our emissions 31% by 2030, and we’re helping customers do the same. Smarter delivery methods, higher streaming performance and open CDN models can already cut energy use by as much as 80% during live streaming. Why build endless capacity and burn
through energy when we can choose better alternatives, already affordable and proven at scale in the real-world?
We need to help media companies win locally to fuel wider economic growth and a diverse content and advertising ecosystem. Capturing and retaining ad value closer to home is becoming a critical battleground. If local broadcasters lose ground on eyeballs and ad dollars to global tech platforms, investment for regional programming with cultural importance suffers and smaller advertisers can’t make headway. That’s bad news for local growth, viewer choice and cultural depth. That’s why we’re laser focused on ad tech that helps brands target localized viewers with relevant experiences, while fueling better margins and a sustainable model for content providers. Fifteen years in, the focus is unchanged: stream at scale, monetize without limits.
http://www.broadpeak.tv/
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