As a founding member of the CDN Alliance, co-chairs of the Low latency Working Group, and a member of both the SRT and HESP alliances, Ceeblue is a low latency live video streaming platform at the forefront of delivering cutting-edge technology.
Working at the crossroads of streaming and network engineering, the Netherlands-based company is best known for its real-time, end-to-end transcoding and delivery, and real-time origin services.
“Ceeblue supports multiple standard industry streaming protocols and codecs and we were the first provider of both WebRTC and HESP real-time protocols,” shared Danny Burns, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Ceeblue.
“Our API-first, protocol-agnostic strategy serves a diverse range of platforms with unique requirements - everything from sports OTT broadcasters to live shopping, virtual events, iGaming platforms, sportsbooks and more.”
In September 2024, Ceeblue rolled out an innovative new framework they developed called WebRTS. The framework resolves many of the drawbacks associated with existing real-time technologies and drives greater operational and economic efficiency.
“Our mission is to make real-time streaming truly accessible. Most frameworks capable of delivering sub-500 millisecond latency are proprietary, locked behind usage fees, or simply unavailable to the public. WebRTS changes that—it delivers real-time video at scale using traditional content delivery networks (CDNs), making ultra-low latency streaming practical and available to everyone,” said Jonas Blötz, VP of Engineering at Ceeblue.
The framework is format-agnostic and has the capacity to support multiple transport protocols and codecs. It also includes many technologies that improve quality of service with its advanced network congestion control that includes selective frame skipping and elimination of video artifacts.
“The potential of WebRTS to revolutionize live sports OTT broadcasting can’t be overstated,” affirms Danny. “End-to-end latencies for massive live sports events will drop from a minute to a second, just like that, without sacrificing quality of experience (QoE) or security in the form of digital rights protection.”
“servers.com knows our industry well and works closely with our team to tailor offerings that make sense, case by case.”
“Cloud encoding costs are trending steadily upwards due to consolidation and the scarcity of compute caused by the AI industry’s demand for chips,” shared Danny.
“Our processes are very operationally and computationally efficient, and we have full control over the configuration of our hardware footprint, so we’ve been able to buck this trend and continue to offer very competitive pricing.”
Maintaining that operational efficiency is a priority at Ceeblue – and one fundamentally connected to the quality of Ceeblue’s underlying streaming infrastructure. Jonas furthers:
“As a platform-as-a-service company, our infrastructure is the backbone of our product. We require quality hardware and, even more importantly, quality connectivity. Every millisecond is important to us as it directly affects our quality of service.
“One of the challenges we faced before was that our previous infrastructure setup - whilst very similar to what we have now - was far less operationally efficient.
“For example, with other providers that we’ve worked with, we’d have account managers for each of the countries or regions that we had infrastructure deployed in. It made managing multiple accounts with the same vendor suboptimal from an operational standpoint.”
“We’ve collaborated to co-develop all the hardware that we currently deploy and many of our most recent cutting-edge advances have taken place on servers.com hardware.”
Partnering with a specialist bare metal cloud provider that understands the needs and priorities of real-time live streaming platforms has enabled Ceeblue to overcome these challenges and maintain their exceptional quality of service.
“servers.com knows our industry well and works closely with our team to tailor offerings that make sense, case by case. They’re always prepared for the types of requests that dynamic, detail-oriented companies like us make,” said Danny.
“Their customer support is of the highest quality and both our account manager, and the technical staff are very effective, flexible and fast. They’re extremely responsive, knowledgeable and provide us with valuable guidance regarding networking and more.”
“The team likes to experiment and explore, just as we do,” furthers Jonas.
“We’ve collaborated to co-develop all the hardware that we currently deploy and many of our most recent cutting-edge advances have taken place on servers.com hardware.”
“We are a bare-metal-first software company, and their expertise is invaluable when we endeavor to try new things that no other live-streaming company has tried before.”
Through this collaboration with the servers.com team, Ceeblue has been able to architect a highly optimized infrastructure underpinned by quality hardware.
“We have very thorough internal benchmarking processes, and we know the difference between hardware that just works well enough and hardware that offers exceptional performance,” said Danny.
“servers.com provides us with the latest and greatest in hardware which we are very pleased with. And having access to a wide range of devices and components allows us to continually improve the performance and efficiency of our service.”
“We are very happy with servers.com’s connectivity in APAC, EMEA and AMER as it allows us to ensure our quality of service in those regions. Additionally, servers.com hardware and traffic pricing in APAC is very competitive, which has allowed us to establish a permanent presence serving customers all over that region.”
Likewise, access to a simplified global account management process has enabled the team to improve overall operational efficiency.
“Unlike previous providers we’ve worked with, with servers.com our account manager handles all of our contracts globally which makes things much easier for us,” said Jonas.
It’s also worth mentioning that, like many live-streaming platforms, Ceeblue use a hybrid infrastructure approach to help uphold their quality of service.
Maintaining partnerships with multiple infrastructure providers allows Ceeblue to establish critical points of presence and ensure redundancy. Building relationships with infrastructure partners that understand this need has, therefore, been crucial.
“Being able to switch providers in a pinch is important to us,” said Danny.
“We’ve been in situations before where entire datacenters have been flooded by natural catastrophes. But thanks to our load balancing and multiple-vendor approach, we’ve come out of these situations unscathed.”
Ceeblue currently maintains a footprint of bare metal servers strategically placed across the globe, with servers.com hardware forming the backbone of that architecture across three continents.
“We are a bare-metal-first software company, and [servers.com’s] expertise is invaluable when we endeavor to try new things that no other live-streaming company has tried before.”
Looking to the future, Ceeblue has a lot to be excited about.
“The release of WebRTS has generated an enormous amount of interest from streaming sports broadcasters – an industry that has traditionally been reluctant or incapable of making the jump to real-time streaming,” said Jonas.
Ceeblue are currently making the final touches to their digital rights management (DRM) support for WebRTS, and will have a live demo at NAB 2025 in Las Vegas at the EZDRM booth. Real-time DRM support will eliminate the largest remaining barrier to real-time streaming for live sports broadcasters globally.
“It’s incredibly exciting and the impact could be huge,” said Danny.
“2024 might have been the last year we ever experience the OTT spoiler effect -where goals are broadcast and celebrated 30-60 seconds sooner over terrestrial than OTT.”
“We’ve already begun providing origin services for WebRTS customers that choose to use third-party CDNs on a massive scale. And in many instances, we’re using dedicated server hosting from servers.com to make this possible.”
“Right now, we’re also testing servers.com’s new scalable bare metal service in the U.S which allows us to spin up available servers via API. It’s providing us with enormous flexibility and even more operational convenience.”
Thanks to Danny Burns and Jonas Blötz for sharing the Ceeblue x servers.com story.
