I say this at the end of every year, but the last twelve months have seen an incredible amount of news and deals in the streaming industry, making it another busy year, with plenty to discuss. I want to thank all those who read my content across LinkedIn and my blog, contributed to the discussions and listened to my podcast. For me, 2025 marks 30 years since I worked on my first webcast, with the Macintosh New York Music Festival in NYC, and my role as an Apple Systems Engineer, which led to where I am today.

I will end 2025 with just over 10 million impressions on LinkedIn, becoming a Top Voice, reaching more than 1.7 million members, along with 2.8 million impressions on my blog, with the podcast nearing 100,000 downloads since launch – all while keeping my content free. While many have tried to convince me to monetize my content via paywalls, charging for newsletters or selling limited access, that’s not why I do this. Not everyone is driven by the need to monetize content, and the currency I focus on in the industry isn’t money, but something more valuable – trust. With readers, vendors, broadcasters, OTT platforms, sports leagues and many others, trust and relationships are my focus.

The industry has taken great care of me over the past three decades, for which I am grateful. I feel a sense of responsibility to help grow the industry by doing my best to inform, educate, and empower others, connecting them with those who are more intelligent than I am and separating facts from opinions. Good leaders invest in people, not ideas, and I am always trying to give back and invest in those in our industry.

Some think I am crazy to have published my cell phone number publicly for 25 years and, on average, reply to all calls and emails within 24 hours. But as a result, that’s where some of my best information comes from, the many people in the industry who are far smarter than I am, giving me the inside details on what’s really taking place. While some don’t like how direct I am in my speech and writing, that’s the number one request I hear from readers: to tell it like it is and provide the facts, without sugar-coating anything. You can be direct and also be professional at the same time.

For all those who have contributed to helping me tell stories, pointed out my spelling mistakes, sent me messages thanking me for my posts, and educated me on topics they know better than I do – I thank you. Next year is going to be a busy one. Get some rest, spend time with your family, catch up on some good video content and get ready for what looks to be a ridiculous amount of streaming news and deals in 2026. Happy Holidays! 🎄 📺

Since I write about vendors, I want to disclose that, effective December 2nd, I have become a minority shareholder in Hydrolix through a personal investment in the company. This is only the second time I have invested in a company in the streaming industry, the other being my seed investment in Datazoom, which I disclosed in a blog post in 2018.

Hydrolix really came onto my radar about 18 months ago when they started hiring a lot of smart people across the industry I respect, and I began to hear their name mentioned by many large OTT platforms and broadcasters, impressed with their platform. I’ve been saying for years that the ingestion, processing, and storage of user data tied to the streaming media workflow are the industry’s most significant problems. It’s not video compression, delivery or playback. Today, many large companies process over 1 billion transactions per day and ingesting and analyzing data at that scale has historically been impossible.

If you can’t manage it, you can’t measure it. And that’s the point of Hydrolix’s real-time data platform, which helps businesses manage and analyze massive volumes of data, enabling them to make informed decisions about their business. The challenges media and entertainment customers face with the volume of data they collect across siloed systems and multiple dashboards are real problems. Many store only 1% of the data they collect and discard the rest due to storage costs, or store it in cold storage, making it inaccessible in real time. These are all problems Hydrolix is working to solve for companies such as FOX, DAZN, and TF1. Further, through their OEM with Akamai, they’re delivering ingest and insights for over 600+ other major media, entertainment, and OTT leaders.

The company recently announced a new real-time CDN observability capability across companies’ distributed infrastructure, from edge to enterprise. This opens their solution for use across any of the major CDN providers. It also solves a critical need for anyone using a multi-CDN strategy, providing critical real-time correlation. While Hydrolix is known across the streaming market, video customers aren’t the only ones they support. The company also pulls in data tied to ad tech, cybersecurity, AIops and ITops. It is deeply integrated with AWS, offering a managed service for origin-to-edge observability for AWS CloudFront, AWS WAF, and AWS Elemental and with Akamai’s Connected Cloud, helping their customers detect and address performance and security issues proactively.

Hydrolix’s CEO Marty Kagan, co-founder of Cedexis in 2008, is a name many readers from the streaming industry will remember. Cedexis’s flagship product, Radar, monitored the quality of experience delivered by third-party CDNs to their customers, which was later acquired by Citrix in 2018. Before Cedexis, Marty spent over 8 years at Akamai. Across the company, there are some really smart people at Hydrolix working to solve big data problems for multiple industries and some of the largest Fortune 500 companies. I like what Marty and the Hydrolix team are building, the way they are going about it and the importance of their data platform that powers these critical data-intensive applications.

In Q1 of 2025, Hydrolix raised $80 million in a Series C round and has raised $140M to date. The company crossed $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in April of 2025. If you want to learn more about Hydrolix, you can listen to my podcast with Marty, recorded earlier in the year, before I was a shareholder.

Disclaimer: I have never bought, sold, or traded any shares in any public CDNs, and even in my managed portfolios, CDNs are excluded. I was previously a shareholder in MediaPublisher and Encoding.com through share grants as an advisor, not via an investment. Aside from Datazoom and Hydrolix, I do not own any other shares of any other vendor in the streaming media industry.

Netflix just made its service less user-friendly when traveling. Netflix announced it no longer supports casting shows from mobile devices to most TVs and streaming devices. Casting will now only work on older Chromecast models without remotes and TVs with Google Cast, regardless of whether you’re on an ad-supported or ad-free Netflix plan.

This is a bad decision, and it will impact users who stream Netflix in hotel rooms, where the hotel often only allows casting and doesn’t let you plug a device into the TV’s HDMI port. Even when you can access the HDMI ports on hotel TVs, the remote is often limited in functionality and won’t let you switch inputs. For this reason, I always throw Samsung, LG, and Vizio remotes in my bag. This change will also affect users who cast to a projector where no native app is available.

Netflix hasn’t said why it is dropping support for casting, but it is an odd approach for a company that says it always thinks about the service from a user standpoint. I can only guess that the motive was to make it harder to share accounts since mobile devices are a loophole around account-sharing restrictions.

Due to AI buildouts, the cost of memory and SSDs is skyrocketing, even for consumer SSDs and gaming hardware. Four months ago, I bought a SanDisk 1TB Portable SSD for $79.39. Today it costs $109.99, although Amazon currently has it on sale for $99. Thanks to buildouts for AI workloads, both DRAM memory used for RAM and NAND memory used for SSDs are in short supply. To put it in context, to support OpenAI’s massive Stargate data center initiative, the company signed deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, which could amount to 40% of current global DRAM output.

According to CyberPowerPC, “global memory (RAM) prices have surged by 500%, and SSD prices have risen by 100%,” forcing them to raise pricing on PC gaming builds. Even though SSDs in AI servers aren’t the same as those in gaming PCs, NAND production for these AI server SSDs can divert from that for consumer SSDs once supply is limited. In September, Western Digital announced HDD price increases and shipping delays of up to 10 weeks, while SanDisk raised NAND pricing and Micron implemented a week-long pricing freeze.

Now, the gaming industry is watching to see if graphics cards are next to see a significant price increase, since the same production facilities that make memory for AI servers and RAM/SSD also produce graphics cards. AMD has already announced small GPU price increases, with more expected.

Netflix’s latest tech blog details how AV1 now powers approximately 30% of all Netflix viewing (on demand), following the launch of AV1 support on Android in 2020. While H.264/AVC remains the primary codec for Netflix viewing, the company expects AV1 to become the top codec very soon. Some other key takeaways from Netflix’s post:

• AV1 sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC and HEVC, resulting in 45% fewer buffering interruptions
• On average, AV1 streaming sessions achieve VMAF scores that are 4.3 points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC sessions
• 85% of Netflix’s HDR catalog (from the perspective of view-hours) has AV1-HDR10+ coverage, and this number is expected to reach 100% in the next couple of months
• The AV1 specification incorporates a unique solution called Film Grain Synthesis (FGS), allowing Netflix to deliver a realistic cinematic film grain experience without the usual data costs
• Netflix is evaluating the use of AV1 in live streaming to deliver high-quality live experiences to large audiences without compromising video quality, and to reduce its delivery costs
• AV1 offers an opportunity to make graphic overlays highly customizable, since layered coding is supported in AV1’s main profile
• Over the past five years (2021–2025), 88% of large-screen devices, including TVs, set-top boxes, and streaming sticks, submitted for Netflix certification have supported AV1, with the vast majority offering full 4K@60fps capability

Netflix says it is excited about the forthcoming release of AV2, announced by the Alliance for Open Media in September, with an expected release at the end of this year.

If you are looking for details on the CDN industry, including marketing sizing, vendors, and trends, do_not_buy any report! I will provide the data to you free of charge. Reports on the market are stealing users’ money by listing “current vendors,” as Limelight, Lumen, StackPath, Verizon, and others that went under years ago, were acquired, or shut down their CDN services. Many also incorrectly list vendors, including Telestream, Citrix, Kaltura, Imperva, Airtel, Brightcove and others that don’t offer any CDN services.

The worst offenders are reports authored and sold by Precedence Research, Grand View Research, Fortune Business Insights, Fact MR, SkyQuest, Avania, IMARC Research, Future Market Insights and Roots Analysis, among others. Many of these reports also misspell vendor names (Cloudfare, Lemelight) or suggest that Verizon is an “emerging market participant” and that Fastly is a “new startup.” The average cost for these reports is $5k, with some costing twice that. Most have no author listed, and those that do list an author also cover markets tied to pharma and automotive. These authors have no understanding of the CDN market.

Many of these reports also suggest that the CDN market is in the tens of billions of dollars today, and some suggest that Netflix and YouTube resell their CDNs to other content owners. Nearly all reports I have seen don’t clearly explain or define how public CDNs disclose their revenue to Wall Street, and they use terms like “video” to describe all delivery revenue, which is inaccurate. See my posts at cdnlist.com and cdnmarket.com for market sizing and vendor list, and please get in touch with me if you need any updated data.

I have not seen a single report on the CDN market, issued by any third-party research firm or Wall Street analyst, that is grounded in facts. If you know of one you think is decent, I am happy to review it and provide my feedback. (dan@danrayburn.com)

For those suggesting that Brightcove is no longer in the market or that everyone has been fired since the Bending Spoons acquisition, that’s far from reality. In the eleven months since being acquired by Bending Spoons, Brightcove has added more features, functionality, and focus than standalone Brightcove ever achieved in the same period. Looking inside my Brightcove account, it’s great to see how much has been added and enhanced.

The company just refreshed its website with a clean, modern look, refocusing its messaging on what its platform does and where its sweet spot lies in the market. They also rolled out a vertical video gallery template across their platform, 4K support for live streaming, auto captioning, a new metadata optimizer tool, and the ability to localize videos into over 50 languages directly within the platform.

In the new year, they plan to roll out a new player UX/UI, a native recommendation engine, a modern gallery experience, the ability to do more with interactive video, and what they are calling AI Content Multiplier, which can turn a single piece of content into various clips.

A lot of progress has been made since the acquisition, and that’s the strength of Bending Spoons: knowing how to build and enhance software services at scale with focus, with focus being the keyword. Previously, Brightcove tried to be everything to everyone and built features that weren’t needed by its core customer base. Part of its business had turned into a pro-services show, which is not its strength. It’s good to see Brightcove back to its roots, offering solutions for two use cases in the market: corporate comms/marketing and broadcast/OTT streaming.