Voices of Video

Cloud video infrastructure is getting squeezed from both sides: audiences expect better quality and more formats like AV1, while finance teams are staring down cloud bills that don’t scale with reality. We sit down with Sarah Walter from Akamai for a one-year check-in on VPU-accelerated instances powered by NETINT , and what stands out is how quickly the conversation has moved from pilots to produ...

Swapping the engine while it runs sounds risky - and in production video systems, it is. Hardware acceleration often gets positioned as “faster encoding,” but that’s not what makes engineering teams hesitate. The real challenge is introducing a new compute model without breaking workflows that already carry years of integrations, monitoring, and operational assumptions. As NAB approaches and the i...

The hardest part of streaming isn’t picking a codec or buying faster hardware. It’s making the whole system work together. In this episode of Voices of Video , Mark Donnigan from NETINT sits down with Joe Waltzer, CEO of Arcadian , to break down the real anatomy of a modern video streaming platform and why teams so often stall at the last mile between a working demo and a production-ready service....

The fastest benchmark number is comforting right up until your video system meets the real world. Staging looks stable. Charts look clean. Then production introduces variability at scale: messy networks, mixed content, thermal constraints, I/O bottlenecks, memory pressure, and timing issues that never show up in controlled tests. That’s where “efficient” can suddenly mean fragile.  In this episode...

“Ramageddon” is what happens when memory pricing goes vertical and suddenly your infrastructure plans no longer pencil out. In this episode of Voices of Video , we talk with Dell Technologies about why video infrastructure is being rebuilt around power limits, cooling realities, and purpose-built silicon like NETINT VPUs . As video becomes the dominant data type and the foundation for AI workloads...

Your neighbor cheered before your stream - now what? In this episode of Voices of Video , we move past the generic advice to “make it faster” and dig into why latency has become a structural constraint in modern video systems. It’s no longer just a performance metric. It dictates where compute lives, how encoding is deployed, how traffic is routed, and what it really takes to deliver reliable, rea...

Real conversation dies the moment latency enters the room. In this episode of Voices of Video , we break down what truly separates traditional streaming from interactive streaming and why the old playbook of centralized encoding, deep buffers, and best-effort delivery simply cannot support audiences that talk back, transact, and co-create in real time. We start by defining the hard technical requi...

What if live video could be small, cool, and endlessly reliable, whether you’re in an OB van, an operating room, or a rail yard? We take you from the edge to the cloud and back again, showing how compact encoders and long-life servers turn constrained spaces and tight power budgets into stable streams that scale. We start with the hardware philosophy: low-power, high-density edge devices built for...

Want to move faster without burning out your core team? In this episode, we unpack what it really means to borrow the brainpower —using managed services to turn cost savings into real product speed. By pairing immediate access to specialized talent with elastic capacity, teams can start building next week instead of waiting months to hire. Instead of stalling on niche roles or sinking time into re...

The promise of “just add AI” sounds great until your live feed is eight seconds behind and the subtitles miss the moment. In this episode of Voices of Video , we confront the gap between AI hype and broadcast reality. From FFmpeg 8’s Whisper integration to off-the-shelf transcription and auto-dubbing, we break down why demos often fall apart in real production pipelines, and what it actually takes...

What if your live stream could feel instant, look sharper at the same bitrate, and cost less to run as you scale? In this episode of Voices of Video , we unpack how a fast-growing live gaming platform rethought its architecture, moved beyond a fully public cloud setup, and built a global hybrid model that delivered measurable results: lower egress spend, higher transcoding density, and a clear lea...

What does it take to run hundreds of live events without chaos? In this episode, we open up the architecture behind G&L’s Playout Hub - a hybrid publishing engine designed for broadcasters, public institutions, and distributed editorial teams that need broadcast precision at scale. Built on decades of systems integration experience at G&L Geißendörfer & Leschinsky GmbH, the platform mi...

Viewers won’t wait for your pipeline to catch up. This episode breaks down a practical roadmap for scaling video at the edge - where power limits, bandwidth costs, and live latency collide. With Advantech’s rugged, modular platforms ( https://www.advantech.com/ ) paired with NETINT’s low-power, high-density ASIC encoders ( https://netint.com/ ), we show how to move the heavy lifting closer to the...

What if transcoding stopped being the constraint and became the engine behind your content strategy? In this episode, Arcadian’s Joe Waltzer and Josh Pesigan explain how Video Processing Units (VPUs) are transforming the economics and timing of video workflows—and why the real win isn’t just lower cost, but the freedom to experiment, iterate, and ship smarter. We start with a reality everyone in s...

Tired of choosing between ripping out your video stack or standing still? In this episode, Kenneth Robinson, Director of Field Application Engineers at NETINT, walks through a practical playbook for deploying Video Processing Units (VPUs) at any stage of growth - from retrofitting a live server to scaling across edge, cloud, and hybrid environments. We start with hardware options that match real-w...

Cameras miss moments; fans don’t. We wanted every decisive peek, every clutch revive, and every chaotic final ring in Apex Legends to be watchable from any team’s perspective - live, synchronized, and affordable. That meant rethinking how we transcode and distribute dozens of POV streams at once without drowning in startup lag or compute spend. We walk through how Scalstrm integrated NETINT VPUs a...

What if your heaviest video jobs spun up in seconds, sipped power, and scaled wherever your viewers are? In this episode, we run NETINT VPUs inside Akamai Cloud and push them across live and just-in-time workflows—multi-codec ABR (AV1/H.264/HEVC), synchronization, DRM, and low-latency packaging included. We start with deployment trade-offs : on-prem cards (control like a tuned sports car), cloud r...

Ever notice how interactive video feels great one moment and laggy the next? We dig into why - and what it takes to make streams feel as immediate and fair as a top-tier multiplayer game. Coming from a gaming-first background, we talk candidly about round-trip latency, jitter, and why 30 ms one way is the magic threshold for experiences where people don’t just watch, but participate . We walk thro...

What if a hardware roadmap could read like a myth? We take Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and map it to a concrete engineering pivot - from life in the ordinary world of CPU/GPU encoding to a high-density, power-efficient future with NETINT’s Codensity G5-based VPUs . We talk through the initial reluctance to touch specialized hardware, the mentors and SDKs that changed our minds, and the exact...

What if video finally got its own processor, and your streaming costs dropped while quality and features went up? In this episode, we dig into the rise of the Video Processing Unit (VPU) - silicon built entirely for video - and explore how it’s transforming everything from edge contribution to multi-view sports. Instead of paying for general-purpose compute and GPU graphics overhead , VPUs put eve...

Live video is exploding, power budgets are shrinking, and the old “throw more GPU at it” mindset is breaking. We dig into the real constraint behind streaming at scale - energy - and share new data showing how VPUs can deliver 4–6x better efficiency than top-tier GPUs while holding quality where viewers notice it most. From the early days of CPU-only encoding to a modern, hybrid stack, we walk thr...

When Ignacio "Nacho" Opazo opened his laptop in 2011, he wasn't just writing code, but rather, he was laying the foundation for what would become Latin America's pioneering OTT platform. A musician turned self-taught developer, Nacho's journey from creating El Telón (Latin America's first streaming television service) to building Zapping (now serving 500,000 paying su...

Energy efficiency is quickly becoming the new battleground in video processing infrastructure, and a groundbreaking benchmark study has revealed just how dramatic the differences can be between competing technologies. In this eye-opening conversation, Chris Milstead from Akamai and Dennis Mungai from Cires21 share findings from their joint research comparing Video Processing Units (VPUs) to tradit...

The economics of video delivery are changing dramatically, forcing media companies to rethink their entire approach to content distribution architecture. In this fascinating roundtable discussion, leaders from Akamai , Scalstrm , and Arcadian reveal how the push for efficiency is reshaping video workflows across the industry. As streaming platforms expand globally, they're discovering that de...

The AI revolution in media production is moving beyond marketing hype into practical applications delivering real value. Ryan Jesperson from Cires21 takes us deep into how their Media Co-Pilot platform is transforming workflows for tier-one broadcasters through thoughtfully implemented artificial intelligence.   Unlike basic AI integrations that simply bolt onto existing systems, Media Co-Pilot ad...