While a private company, my thanks to Gilles Domartini, CEO and Founder of Cleeng, for allowing me to disclose details about the company’s revenue. Cleeng has been in the market for fourteen years, having raised a total of €10 million and ended 2024 with €20 million in revenue, with a 7% EBITDA margin, up from €5 million in revenue in 2021. The company counts 40 customers across four continents, targeting those with a monthly budget of at least €4,000. The company ended 2024 with 140 employees and reported that 65% of its revenue comes from the US market. These are great numbers for Cleeng, as they demonstrate growth and profitability without requiring a significant investment of capital.

During the call, I also had the opportunity to see Cleeng’s recently announced Pro platform, which enables content owners to launch a subscription management platform free of charge for up to 10,000 subscribers. You can check out more details on that platform here.

I’ve recently spoken with and presented to more than two dozen last-mile providers, and here’s a list of live streaming events and software downloads they are closely monitoring from a capacity planning standpoint. We’ve recently gotten viewership stats from live events across YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix, so it’s been interesting for me to hear from ISPs and streamers on how they are using recent telemetry data for capacity planning. If you think I missed a potential big traffic event from the list (at least 10M+ AMA), please add it to the comments section.

• YouTube NFL Exclusive, (Sept 5, 19.7M AMA)
• Amazon Prime Video TNF Kickoff, (Sept 11, 17.7M AMA)
• Netflix Canelo vs. Crawford boxing event (Sept 13, 36.6M AMA)
• Battlefield 6 launch (Oct 10)
• Fortnite season, Chapter 6 Season 5 (Nov 1)
• Call of Duty Black Ops 7 launch (Nov 14)
• Netflix Jake Paul vs. Gervonta Davis boxing event (Nov 14)
• ESPN’s WWE premium live events (PLEs), the first one was Sept. 20 (4x per year)
• Netflix’s two NFL games on Christmas (Dec 25)
• YouTube NFL Sunday Ticket (all games until January, final date TBD)
• Amazon Prime Video TNF (all games until Dec. 27)
• NBA Season Long: Monday (Peacock), Tuesday (NBC/Peacock), Wednesday (ESPN), Thursday and Friday (Prime Video), Saturday (ABC/ESPN/Prime Video), Sunday (ABC/ESPN/Prime Video)
• NHL migrating to DAZN for 2025-2026 season (NHL TV no longer doing distribution, so traffic will look different now coming from DAZN)
• Amazon Prime Video NFL Wild Card playoff game (Jan 10 or 11)
• UFC on Paramount+ (2026, 46 events in the year, 13 are major)

One thing to note when comparing live events to previous years is the increasing number of large-scale live events that are now global. Some streamers have the rights to distribute events worldwide, as seen with Netflix’s NFL games on Christmas and YouTube’s coverage of the NFL game from Brazil.

We’ve seen inaccurate statements from some vendors recently regarding CDN services. Achieving a “50% bitrate reduction” doesn’t mean you can automatically “reduce CDN costs by up to 50%.” Beamr and other vendors promote this idea in press releases, such as the one Beamr issued for a demo at IBC, but it’s clear that many vendors don’t understand how CDN contracts work and how the services are purchased. I see this time and again with vendors, with another saying they can deliver video at a “fraction of the cost of traditional CDN,” or at a “lower cost,” but they never talk numbers.

Orange did a blog post about their CDN services in the lead up to IBC, saying that “4K and 8K are becoming the standard,” which is false. Almost no content is available in 4K, and no one is producing 8K content, let alone trying to stream it. The narrative that traffic across CDNs is going to “exponentially grow,” due to use cases involving 4K, 8K, VR or all live broadcast viewership moving from pay TV to streaming, isn’t true. That’s a fact, not my opinion.

I’m all for new ideas in the industry, but an idea alone is not enough. No vendor should start their pitch by making statements of how the current situation doesn’t work well and is broken. Delivering video over the internet today works very well at scale and continues to improve. Too many vendors say they can do better by building the “next generation” of something, at a lower price, with better performance, without any details to back that up, like we’ve seen from Blockcast, which suggests caches should be placed in consumers’ homes. They also say on their website that their solution is needed to help prevent streams of the World Cup Final from “vanishing,” whatever that means.

I see vendors using words to describe the “strength” and “quality” of their networks, with almost none of the vendors detailing capacity, regions deployed, or delivery services supported. Orange says their “footprint is worldwide,” but their delivery map shows coverage in two areas, Europe and Africa. Also, images on their CDN page are broken, above a heading that says their CDN is “reliable.” The entire capacity of Orange’s CDN solution could have handled only 5-7% of the total Tbps of capacity of the last Super Bowl. Quality, reach and capacity must all be discussed together, not independently.

Over the years, the market for delivery services and technology has been littered with vendors who all promised to do it better, at a lower cost, but are now gone. When vendors start making statements of how the current situation doesn’t work well, is broken, and they can do better by building the “next generation” of something, at a lower price, with better performance, without any details to back that up, that’s not good for the industry or for vendors.

The OpenMOQ Software Consortium has launched as a new effort among vendors and content owners, focused on advancing MOQ-based technology through open-source software. The consortium is tasked with developing high-performance software that will enable the next generation of media contribution, distribution, and playback. OpenMOQ is a collaborative effort to accelerate development, enhance interoperability and share cost between vendors, distributors and in some cases, even competitors. In this interview, Will Law from Akamai and Tomas Kvasnicka from CDN77 discuss the formation of OpenMOQ and its goals.

Vimeo has agreed to be acquired by Bending Spoons in an all-cash transaction that values Vimeo at approximately $1.38 billion, equating to $7.85 per share for Vimeo shareholders. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025. At Vimeo’s IPO in 2021, the company’s market cap was approximately $17.8 billion. A year later, Vimeos’ market cap fell under $2 billion and never got back above that number. More to come as more details emerge.

With any acquisition, one could argue that a company paid too much, and much of that is up to personal opinion. Looking at the numbers, Vimeo’s trailing-twelve-month revenue as of June 30 was $415, and they projected double-digit growth by the end of the year. Based on that, Vimeo is paying 3x projected 2025 revenue. However, at the end of Q2, Vimeo had $303 million in cash, so the multiple is more around 2.2x projected 2025 revenue.

I see some comparing Brightcove’s business, which Bending Spoons acquired, to Vimeo, but the companies are very different. At the end of Q3 2024, Brightcove had 1,923 premium customers, paying an average of $8,450 monthly. Outside of premium customers, Brightcove had 469 “starter” customers, paying $350 monthly. For comparison, at the end of Q2 2025, Vimeo’s self-serve plan had 1.5 million customers with an ARPU of $16.16 a month. Their “enterprise” customer count was 4,000 with an ARPU of $2,058 per month. The companies have a different set of customers. In the first 6 months of this year, Vimeo spent $60.9 million in R&D and $63 million in Sales and marketing expenses. General and admin expenses were another $37 million, along with over $14 million in stock-based compensation expenses. There are numerous cost savings that Bending Spoons will take advantage of to lower Vimeo’s costs, also at the expense of employee headcount, which is a business necessity as part of this deal.

A few weeks before the deal was announced, Vimeo laid off 10% of its workforce, which means Vimeo has now laid off 26% of its employees in the past three years, across two different CEOs. Like all vendors, Vimeo has been working hard to improve its balance sheet and net loss, and unfortunately, reducing headcount has been part of that process. In 2022, Vimeo’s net loss for the year was approximately $79.6 million. In 2023, their net loss decreased to $22 million, and in 2024, they reported a positive net income of $27 million. Their balance sheet continues to improve, but at the expense of jobs. Before the deal was announced, Vimeo’s stock was down 22% over the past year and 92% since its IPO.

The rumors of a Paramount Skydance bid for WBD are being overhyped, with many not understanding the difficulty in combining any two independent OTT services. I see many suggesting that combining Paramount+ and HBO Max into one service would allow for “higher ARPU” and benefit from “lower costs” from bundling the two services together. But what many media pundits don’t understand is how video tech stacks work and their complexity. It would take multiple years to combine two services into one if that were the strategy. Just look at how long it took for Disney to enable Hulu content within Disney+, a service they already owned.

Further complicating any integration are the live channels that Paramount+ and HBO Max have, along with the new TNT Sports app currently in development and expected to roll out in April, once the WBD separation happens. Paramount Global could also risk losing what makes each streaming service distinct, if combined, and it’s most likely they would simply bundle the two, not integrate them into one app and service. The company would also have to look at the overlap of consumers across both services, and a bundled discounted price means a lower APRU, not higher. It would be similar to wholesale deals that the OTT providers cut with pay TV providers, where the OTT service is paid less per subscriber each month than they get from selling to consumers directly.

While the WSJ report said a bid is imminent, other news outlets say conversations internally at Paramount Skydance have not gone that far. Irrelevant of who’s right, if Paramount Skydance made an offer for WBD, it would be far from a done deal.

WBD would have to allow time for others to make competitive bids and then review any additional offers. If they were to accept the bid by Paramount Skydance, it would need to be approved by WBD’s board and then shareholders. The deal would also need to be approved by regulators, which may not be easy, considering the current administration is not a fan of CNN. The FCC approved the Paramount and Skydance merger weeks after Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump had filed against the company, which many believe is no coincidence.

It has previously been reported that WBD’s CEO has been discussing offers for CNN and other parts of the debt-laden WBD business, which currently has $35.6 billion in debt. Some pieces of WBD’s business could also be divested even before a bid from Paramount Skydance or anyone else is made, if an offer is indeed coming. Multiple media reports, dating back more than a year, have detailed David Ellison’s interest in WBD as a way to beef up Paramount Skydance’s film slate, so his interest in WBD is not new. What might look good on paper and be easy to suggest is unlikely to be the reality if a deal were to take place.

Open Caching is dead. Like it or not, that’s the truth. The idea of Open Caching made sense on paper, intending to allow ISPs to adopt an open standard framework for on-net eyeballs. It’s a smart idea, but so is multicasting, which was also never widely adopted, amongst many other technologies tied to streaming. What many vendors in the streaming industry forget, or haven’t realized, is that the best technology is not always what gets adopted. It doesn’t matter if you have a better way to ingest, encode, store, deliver or playback video. If customers don’t adopt, implement at scale, and see value in it, then it is not a viable solution in the market. The lack of adoption of Open Caching isn’t a knock on all those who tried to make it work, but time has run out. As an idea, Open Caching was theoretically sound, yet not practical in its implementation.

No large-scale adoption of the technical specification has occurred in the market among content owners, last-mile providers, and CDN vendors. None of the companies that have DIY CDNs for full or partial video delivery, including Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Meta, Prime Video (AWS), WBD, and many others, use or support Open Caching. Content owner Disney supports the spec, but only a small portion of its overall video delivery utilizes Open Caching. Prime Video also uses it for a small portion of its video delivery, via third-party vendors, but AWS itself doesn’t support the spec.

None of the largest third-party CDNs, which make up the majority of the market, including Akamai, Fastly, CDN77, AWS, Google Media CDN, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Gcore, and MainStreaming, support Open Caching on their network. The Open Caching spec was never widely adopted and has never contributed to delivering even 1% of all video bits delivered over the internet in any given year. A few network operators have utilized the Open Caching specification, but none of them have publicly disclosed the cost of deploying it or the amount of traffic they have supported. Privately, Telefonica, Airtel, and others have shared Tbps numbers with me, and they are small. Some vendors that sell delivery solutions to telcos, carriers, and last-mile networks support or supported the Open Caching spec, including Qwilt, Vecima, ATEME, Broadpeak, Synamedia, and others; however, their combined revenue for video delivery using the spec was 1% or less of the total market for third-party CDN delivery services in 2023. See market sizing at cdnmarket.com

While proponents of Open Caching have consistently listed the benefits as being more cost-effective, scalable, and providing a better experience for consumers, these claims have not been proven at scale. For large-scale live streaming events produced by Prime Video, FOX, Paramount, DAZN, and WBD, among others, no Open Caching solution has been utilized as the primary CDN in a multi-CDN strategy, nor has it accounted for even 25% of the overall traffic during an event. Some suggest that Open Caching can “reduce overall operational expenses,” but numbers have never been shared by any customers utilizing Open Caching, since discussing cost savings without also considering scale is irrelevant. Part of the problem is that many years of predictions of higher bitrates, large volumes of 4K video, all linear TV going online and VR applications, among others, never materialized. Encoding was optimized even further, bitrates decreased, and codecs improved, all the while, consumers didn’t see the value in paying for higher-quality video. The QoE of video got “good enough.”

Those who sell the idea of Open Caching often use words like “scale,” but when it comes to scaling infrastructure of any kind, it is easy for someone to say a solution can handle “large spikes,” but that’s just a marketing term. Quality, scale, performance, etc., are all just words with no meaning if not defined with numbers. Open Caching was also intended to enable large content owners to reduce their CDN costs; however, the rapid rate of price compression with traditional CDNs rendered Open Caching unnecessary. By my estimates, starting in 2022, Open Caching began to cost more per unit than using a third-party CDN, as pricing reached $0.0006 and has since fallen to $0.00045, its lowest point, which is only available to the largest customers — those that Open Caching was targeting. When CDNs lowered their prices without requiring higher traffic commitments, or didn’t need any commitments at all, the value of deploying Open Caching significantly diminished.

For some, Open Caching was a dream as a way to capture big content’s attention and localize it on their ASN, sharing in a revenue stream. However, the revenue-sharing model, which has been hyped for many years, has proven to be a myth and has never materialized. The idea of sharing cache resources across content providers has always been attractive, but that’s all it was — an idea in theory, but not in practice.