Netskrt Blog

6 Principles for the Future of Streaming Infrastructure

Admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Streaming has outgrown the infrastructure assumptions it was built on.

Scaling Live Streaming Delivery for the World Cup

Admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Live sports have become one of the defining tests for streaming infrastructure, and the upcoming FIFA World Cup is set to raise the stakes even higher.

Netskrt to Support Streaming Delivery for World Cup as Live Sports Momentum Accelerates Globally

Netskrt Blog — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Company’s live sports footprint has surged over the past year as streaming platforms prepare for unprecedented event-driven traffic

Brazil’s Growing Live Streaming Infrastructure | Netskrt

Admin — Tue, 05 May 2026 07:00:00 GMT

As the global streaming landscape stretches and flexes under the weight of ever-growing demand, some regions feel the pressure more acutely than others. Brazil and the broader Latin American market sit squarely in that category: vibrant, mobile-first, sports-obsessed, and scaling fast.

The Future of Streaming Infrastructure | Netskrt

Admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Streaming has become the default way audiences consume video. From global live sports to binge-worthy series drops, viewers now expect every stream to start instantly, play flawlessly, and maintain high quality from beginning to end.

But behind the scenes, the infrastructure supporting those expectations is under increasing strain.

In a new article for Streaming Media Magazine, Netskrt CEO Siegfried Luft explores a growing disconnect between how streaming behaves today and the way most content delivery networks (CDNs) were originally designed to operate.

Traditional CDN architectures were built for a different era, one defined by predictable traffic patterns and primarily on-demand viewing. That model worked well when demand could be forecast and scaled incrementally. But today’s streaming environment looks very different.

Live events now draw massive concurrent audiences, often numbering in the tens of millions. At the same time, higher-resolution formats like 4K and HDR are increasing bandwidth requirements, while viewer expectations for instant playback and uninterrupted experiences have never been higher.

The result is a fundamental mismatch between legacy infrastructure and modern demand.

As the article outlines, meeting these new requirements calls for a more distributed and dynamic approach to delivery. Instead of relying on hundreds of large, centralized points of presence, the next generation of infrastructure must extend deeper into the network by leveraging thousands of lightweight, software-defined nodes positioned closer to end users.

This shift toward hyper-distribution enables content to be delivered locally, reducing latency and minimizing the impact of network congestion. It also introduces greater elasticity, allowing capacity to scale up during peak events and scale down during quieter periods—an essential capability in a world where streaming demand behaves more like sudden surges than steady growth.

Of course, distribution alone is not enough. Managing a network of this scale requires intelligent orchestration. As highlighted in the piece, centralized control planes powered by real-time data and automation are critical to ensuring that capacity is allocated efficiently and performance remains consistent, even during periods of extreme demand.

Streaming platforms can no longer rely on yesterday’s infrastructure to meet tomorrow’s expectations. That’s exactly the challenge Netskrt was built to solve. By rethinking content delivery from the ground up, Netskrt has developed a hyper-distributed, software-defined architecture that extends deep into last-mile networks, bringing capacity closer to end users and enabling more efficient, localized delivery at scale.

As the industry continues to grow—and as live, high-stakes events become an even larger part of the streaming mix—Netskrt’s approach is designed to meet the moment. Its platform combines massive distribution at the edge with centralized, intelligent orchestration, allowing capacity to scale dynamically with demand while maintaining a consistent quality of experience. The result is an infrastructure model purpose-built for the realities of modern streaming: elastic, efficient, and engineered to perform when it matters most.

Author

Siegfried Luft

Lumen & Netskrt Partnership | Modern Video Delivery

Admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 07:00:00 GMT

The streaming industry is entering a new phase of growth, and the infrastructure required to support it is becoming more complex by the day.

A new article published on Streaming Media by Lumen’s VP of Strategic Technology Alliances Marco Rota explores one of the most important shifts happening behind the scenes of the streaming ecosystem: the growing importance of collaboration between infrastructure providers.

As audiences grow and live sports streaming becomes a dominant force in media consumption, delivery systems are facing enormous pressure. Millions of viewers may tune in simultaneously to watch the same event, creating sudden spikes in traffic that traditional delivery architectures were never designed to handle.

This is particularly true for tier-one live sports, where even a brief buffering interruption can ruin the experience for fans and create reputational risk for streaming platforms.

Behind every successful stream is an ecosystem of technology providers working together to deliver content efficiently. From edge computing infrastructure to content delivery networks and ISP partnerships, streaming performance depends on how well these systems operate in concert.

Marco’s article highlights how Lumen’s Edge Bare Metal platform supports Netskrt’s purpose-built CDN model by providing on-demand computing capacity and direct access to Lumen’s global fiber network. Together, these capabilities help extend streaming infrastructure closer to viewers while maintaining the low latency required for live events.

This kind of partnership reflects a broader shift happening across the industry. Streaming platforms are increasingly relying on multiple CDN partners and specialized infrastructure providers to ensure resilience and maintain quality of experience. In fact, multi-CDN strategies have become a critical foundation for maintaining stability and delivery performance at scale.

As streaming continues to grow globally, infrastructure providers must rethink how they deliver capacity, performance, and reliability. No single platform can solve the challenge alone.

The future of streaming will be built through partnerships that combine complementary technologies, deeper network visibility, and infrastructure positioned closer to end users.

Guest author

Marco Rota

Meet Moira Dang | Engineering the Future of Streaming

Admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

In celebration of International Women’s Month, Women in Streaming Media is recognizing leaders whose work is shaping the direction of the streaming industry. Netskrt is proud to see our own Moira Dang, Co-Founder, COO, and VP of Engineering, honored among the remarkable women driving innovation across the sector.

A More Profitable CDN Model for Video Streaming

Admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Streaming Media Blog’s Dan Rayburn has published a new article featuring the unique model and market approach we’re taking here at Netskrt. In it, he explores how we’ve built a model for scaling CDN capacity that is designed to be cost-effective and profitable in a streaming landscape defined by relentless performance expectations and pricing pressure.

Dan provides a detailed glimpse into Netskrt’s role in supporting tier-one live streaming events. He connects that work to Netskrt’s novel underlying approach: broad, deep deployment of pure software PoP instances that reduce underlying cost and increase deployment flexibility.

As Dan reports, Netskrt’s current steady-state capacity is approximately 65 Tbps, while our model allows substantially more capacity to be instantiated within 24 to 48 hours when required. He also highlights the fact that Netskrt can spin up additional capacity in minutes using cloud-based spot instances.

The article further explains Netskrt’s stratified infrastructure strategy, aligning CapEx-oriented deployments with persistent demand and leaning toward OpEx-based options when demand is spiky and seasonal, as is common with major live sports events.

With approximately $30 million in invested capital, Netskrt expects to exceed a 1:1 capital-to-revenue ratio in 2026 and reach a 1:4 capital-to-capacity ratio. Conventional CDNs typically operate closer to 4:1 and 1:1, respectively. As Dan notes, Netskrt’s current growth trajectory, which has picked up significantly over the last year, puts us on pace to reach 150 Tbps by the end of 2026.

Guest author

Dan Rayburn

Live Sports Streaming Remains the Biggest Challenge for ISPs: Netskrt Survey

Netskrt Blog — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Internet Service Providers say the right CDN strategies improve Quality of Experience

Capex-Efficient CDN Infrastructure for Video Delivery

Admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 08:00:00 GMT

The shifting sands of the CDN market

Video streaming dominates the internet, representing around 70% of all internet traffic. In all its forms, on-demand, linear, and live, it is expected to grow at double digits for the foreseeable future. Despite these rosy projections, video streaming is a challenging business for content delivery network (CDN) providers. The price per gigabyte (GB) of video delivery continues to erode at a material rate annually, while increases in traffic demand additional network investments.

For CDN providers, this begs the question of what their options are to counter increasing demand for delivery capacity with tight margins. Traditional CDN providers with large network investments are diversifying into new revenue streams such as security and edge services. While this provides alternative margin expansion options, it does not solve the dilemma of offering video streaming.

This blog explores the option of offering video streaming with a low capex strategy that capitalizes on available edge infrastructure aligned with a cloud consumption model. This alternative model can counter decreasing margins while addressing the need for scale and availability.

A new deployment model for CDNs

Investments in edge infrastructure by communication service providers have resulted in excess capacity as the initial euphoria for delivering multiple use cases faces slowing adoption. Bare-metal capacity can be rented on a pay-per-use basis. Video streaming is a compelling use case for bare-metal edge infrastructure. In this case, a video delivery provider hosts the caching engine at the communication service provider edge on a pay-per-use consumption model.

This deployment model aligns revenue and cost on a utilization basis. For this to succeed, the revenue margin should exceed the marginal cost of transferring 1GB of traffic capacity. The model needs to scale capacity as live events introduce peak traffic demands that far exceed traffic patterns related to linear or on-demand video streaming. It presents a great opportunity for a provider to participate in multi-CDN offerings, the norm for video distribution by large studios such as Disney, Paramount, Prime Video, and others. An orchestration layer is needed to manage the full life cycle of media delivery including deployment, configuration, support, and reporting.

The accrued benefits to this deployment model include:

Aligning revenue with variable costs to maintain margin targets
Scaling by using a distributed edge infrastructure with diverse routing options
Achieving high-availability targets with a distributed and highly available edge infrastructure
Meeting security targets with a dedicated network along with embedded video security such as DRM
Meeting the peak traffic demands of live events with a scalable edge network
Providing coverage in a wide footprint based on the availability of edge infrastructure

The CDN model that scales and still drives superior QoE

While this model entails numerous benefits, it faces competitive challenges from CDN providers that continue to expand network capacity and focus on value-added features such as programmability, edge use cases, and expanded security services. The low-capex model can nonetheless evolve its capabilities. It can move from an initial focus on video delivery toward a programmability paradigm, introduce personalized and interactive media edge use cases, and expand security services such as DDoS and BOT management. These developments will expand an already attractive business model for video delivery toward higher growth and margin services. The goal ultimately is to drive superior customer experience.

Looking to the future of content delivery

Investments by communication service providers in edge infrastructure have opened the possibilities for media use cases. A new breed of media delivery providers can leverage this infrastructure to provide video delivery on a variable pay-per-use cost model. This can alleviate the degrading margins that traditional CDN providers experience due to declining GB prices to support a high-fixed cost network. This is an evolving market, especially with the emergence of inferencing at the edge and its related impact on delivery traffic.

Conclusion

At a velocity rarely seen in technology, the manner in which video entertainment is delivered to consumers is changing to a purely over-the-top (OTT) model. Especially when viewed through the lens of live entertainment, including sports, this places enormous strain on traditional CDNs. Clearly, technical changes are required in order for the business models of content streaming platforms and CDNs to flourish while at the same time delivering on the quality expectations of the most important entity in this entire equation–the consumer. Netskrt is leading the way with a CDN purpose-built for high-value payloads such as live sports streaming, delivering superior quality while disrupting prevailing economics.

Guest author

Ghassan Adbo