Over the space of two decades, real-time live streaming technology has gone from novelty to necessity. Today, the technology is a staple resource for organizations across sectors, enabling them to overcome geographical barriers and engage with global audiences.
Real-time video streaming platform provider, nanocosmos, has been at the forefront of this development. Delivering real-time live streaming solutions for a wide range of use cases including enterprise townhall meetings, iGaming, live auctions and more, nanocosmos supports businesses to achieve easy, worry-free live streaming.
We sat down with Oliver Lietz, CEO of nanocosmos, to talk about the company’s unique nanoStream product and commitment to live-streaming innovation. We also discuss the key challenges that come with growing a live-streaming platform and how a hybrid infrastructure approach enables nanocosmos to deliver exceptional experiences to global audiences.
Real-time live streaming involves delivering video content over the internet near instantaneously. It’s typically used for applications where immediate interaction is required. Enterprise townhall meetings, iGaming, live auctions, interactive events, e-learning and live shopping are just some examples. Unlike traditional streaming which can have delays of several seconds (or even minutes) real-time live streaming requires ultra-low latency. Content must be delivered in under one second whilst still ensuring a smooth end user experience.
nanocosmos is a real-time video streaming platform provider. Their comprehensive solution, nanoStream, comes with everything needed to deliver interactive streaming including adaptive bitrate, stream protection and advanced analytics.
Combined, these features enable nanocosmos’ users to deliver outstanding interactive streams across a range of use cases. Underpinned by a robust content delivery network (CDN), nanocosmos can deliver these top-tier streaming experiences across all regions - even over varying internet connection qualities.
“Each use case comes with unique requirements, and we ensure that our platform meets those needs,” said Oliver Lietz, CEO of nanocosmos.
“For our clients, a reliable and robust service with 24/7 global reach, adaptive streaming, and compatibility across all devices are top priorities. Security and stream analytics also play a crucial role. And for some enterprise clients like Twebcast, easy API integration and GDPR compliance are also essential”.
“Demand for scalable, secure, high-quality streaming has intensified, requiring even faster and more reliable video delivery.”
Back in 2016, nanocosmos hit a milestone for the streaming industry: the launch of its unique H5Live Player, capable of delivering streams to all devices worldwide in under a second. And since then, the streaming industry has continued to evolve at an exponential rate amidst rapid technological advancement and shifting media consumption habits.
Today, viewers of interactive streaming are often spread across multiple locations over the globe – all on different devices. It means that, for companies like nanocosmos, continuing to provide cutting-edge audio and video delivery solutions requires a continuous commitment to innovation.
“Demand for scalable, secure, high-quality streaming has intensified, requiring even faster and more reliable video delivery,” said Oliver. “We focus on use cases from a 360-degree perspective to make sure specific needs are covered and stay open to new technologies, continuously integrating the latest advancements to enhance our streaming capabilities”.
Looking to the future, Oliver and his team at nanocosmos anticipate that emerging technologies like AI-supported live streaming, new streaming protocols and other innovations will become increasingly important for reaching and engaging audiences.
“Technologies like AI are poised to have a significant impact on our lives,” furthered Oliver. “In fact, we’ve already integrated AI into our nanoStream platform. We utilize AI-based live captions, translations and have begun leveraging machine learning for stream alerting. These new streaming innovations, protocols and codecs are helping us expand the outreach of live video content to remote regions of the world”.
“In our business it’s highly important to stay on top of modern technologies, and servers.com helps us achieve a modern, performant, stable, and 100% available infrastructure.”
For Oliver and his team, audience experience always comes first. But continuously delivering exceptional end-user experiences comes with challenges, as Oliver shares:
“Whether it’s through AI, new protocols like QUIC, WebTransport, or HTTP3, the focus is always on delivering the highest quality experience for viewers. The challenge lies in maintaining exceptional levels of service across live streaming applications – especially as they can be running anywhere in the world”.
Establishing a dependable streaming infrastructure foundation has been integral to nanocosmos’ ability to consistently deliver the highest quality streaming services to their users. The service relies on low-latency, scalable infrastructure and high-bandwidth connections per live streaming server.
Needless to say, finding the right balance hasn’t always been easy.
“Infrastructure significantly impacts the real-time experience in various ways. From providing a CDN with endpoints closest to our audience to ensuring interconnectivity between countries and continents, the role of infrastructure is crucial,” said Oliver.
“Beyond connectivity, we also deploy technologies like AI speech-to-text and live transcoding, each with its own set of requirements. One of our biggest challenges is securing the right hardware in the right locations to deliver the best possible user experience.
“Another ongoing challenge is the rapidly evolving hardware that underpins our infrastructure. This necessitates constant testing and reevaluation of our choices to ensure we deliver on our promises”.
“Infrastructure significantly impacts the real-time experience in various ways. From providing a CDN with endpoints closest to our audience to ensuring interconnectivity between countries and continents, the role of infrastructure is crucial.”
For nanocosmos, maintaining a commitment to 100% uptime is non-negotiable – despite the many streaming challenges that come with this at the infrastructure level. For Oliver and his team, the key to achieving this lies in a hybrid infrastructure approach.
“We collaborate with multiple partners and are continually seeking new partnerships to strengthen our position,” said Oliver.
“We actively seek high-bandwidth connections per server, modern high core counts and high core frequency servers. This, in combination with a wide variety of locations to deploy is a good starting point.
“We chose dedicated streaming servers from servers.com to widen the current infrastructure list for our StreamCloud CDN. For our live transcoding processes, we need high-performance servers in locations all over the world, and servers.com is one of the important building blocks for our CDN.
“With bare metal server hosting from servers.com, we achieved better coverage in the EU, Asia and the U.S.
“In our business it’s highly important to stay on top of modern technologies, and servers.com helps us achieve a modern, performant, stable, and 100% available infrastructure”.
With new technologies like AI-supported live streaming emerging rapidly, innovation remains a top priority for nanocosmos. It’s one of the many reasons why the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) is a staple in the team’s calendar each year.
“At IBC 2024, I’m most excited to connect with industry leaders and innovators to exchange ideas on the future of real-time streaming. IBC is the perfect place to discover cutting-edge technologies and to network with peers,” said Oliver.
“It’s also a unique opportunity to showcase the latest advancements in our technology. I’m looking forward to seeing how our solutions can inspire and empower businesses across various sectors”.
This year servers.com and nanocosmos will come together at IBC for a discussion on the Content Everywhere stage, Hall 14, Sunday 15th September at 17:30.
servers.com Streaming Specialist, Lukas Navickas will join Oliver to discuss the key to delivering live low-latency video at scale with infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
You can also find nanocosmos throughout the event at booth 5.D39 and servers.com at booth 5.C34.
