The barriers to AV1 adoption are worth noting because they are not primarily about the codec itself. Hardware decode support leads at 54%, followed by toolchain limitations at 43% and encoding compute costs at 37%. The licensing story is essentially a non-issue for AV1, with less than 1% cited it as a barrier. This stands in sharp contrast to VVC, where 44% flagged licensing and royalties as a concern. That licensing gap alone may determine which next-gen codec is deployed first.

One additional data point I found interesting: organizations running three or more codecs in production today are 57 times more likely to have AV1 in their stack compared to single-codec operators. Current codec stack complexity is the strongest predictor of future adoption velocity. That pattern makes intuitive sense. Teams with multi-codec experience already have the tooling, testing workflows, and operational maturity to add another format without starting from scratch.

VP9 offers a cautionary data point here. The data shows it sits at 15% production deployment with respondents, with only 15% planning further adoption, and 70% reporting no plans at all. VVC generates interest in evaluation, with 29% planning to adopt it, yet the successor to HEVC remains at just 4% in production deployment. It’s clear that VVC is facing both licensing headwinds and toolchain immaturity, unlike AV1. The report describes a clear codec progression ladder: organizations tend to climb from H.264 through HEVC and VP9 to AV1, meaning the current stack is a better predictor of next-gen adoption than company size or industry vertical.

GPUs Dominate, But the Hardware Picture Is More Complicated Than It Appears
GPUs hold 72% of the hardware acceleration market share, driven primarily by NVIDIA’s NVENC ecosystem. That number is not surprising. What is more revealing is what is happening underneath it. Among organizations using hardware acceleration, 41% deploy multiple hardware types simultaneously—GPU plus VPU, GPU plus on-premises appliance, or broader combinations. This is not a one-size-fits-all market. Organizations are matching different hardware to different workload profiles, and the data suggests this trend is accelerating rather than consolidating.

GPU-specific pain points explain the hardware diversification. Power consumption leads at 39%, followed by codec/feature gaps at 37% and insufficient stream density at 35%. For live and high-density workloads, these are meaningful operational constraints. The report notes that VPU evaluation intent stands at 49%, nearly matching the 51% who plan to evaluate GPUs. Live and broadcast operators are 2.2 times more likely to adopt VPUs, driven by density economics and latency requirements that GPUs can struggle to meet at scale.

The primary encoding method split also tells a story of transition. Software/CPU-based encoding remains the single largest encoding architecture at 37%, while hardware-accelerated (30%) and hybrid approaches (32%) collectively account for 62% of the market. The era of pure software encoding is winding down for anyone operating at a meaningful scale.

AI in Encoding Has Crossed the Mainstream Threshold
60% of respondents currently deploy AI/ML in at least one encoding workflow, and 70% plan to expand those capabilities in 2026. That is no longer experimental. The more interesting story is where AI is heading versus where it started. Current deployments concentrate on what I would call adjacent applications: transcription and captioning at 46%, scene classification at 37%, and super-resolution at 26%. These sit next to the encoding pipeline but do not fundamentally change how encoding decisions are made. The highest-growth applications tell a different story. Content-aware ladder generation shows the highest planned growth at 77%, followed by QoE prediction at 50%. These are core encoding intelligence functions—they sit inside the pipeline and directly influence bitrate allocation, resolution selection, and quality optimization.

This migration from auxiliary to core defines the AI trend in encoding for 2026. It also explains why AI expansion correlates with operational scale rather than company size. Organizations processing high VOD volumes are 2.3 times more likely to plan AI expansion regardless of employee count. GPU users are 2.4 times more likely, since GPU infrastructure provides the compute foundation for AI workloads. The implication for hardware vendors is clear: offering AI-ready compute alongside encoding capability could become a baseline expectation.

The Quality Measurement Gap Nobody Is Talking About
VMAF has crossed the 50% adoption threshold at 52%, establishing itself as the de facto objective quality metric for the encoding industry. PSNR remains at 32%, mostly due to legacy pipeline inertia rather than active preference. But here is the number I found interesting: 30% of respondents operate without any formal QA metrics.

These organizations are making encoding decisions such as codec selection, bitrate allocation, and hardware investment without systematic quality measurement. The report finds they are 2.7 times more likely to report frequent quality issues and 1.9 times more likely to cite viewer complaints as a business problem. That gap correlates strongly with team size: organizations with one to two-person video teams are 3.1 times more likely to lack formal QA than those with 10+ person teams.

This connects to a broader theme in the data. Content Adaptive Encoding (CAE) has nearly identical adoption across live (25%) and VOD (28%) workflows, which the report identifies as the clearest indicator of encoding sophistication, regardless of use case. Organizations using CAE for live workflows are 2.4 times more likely to also use AI/ML in their encoding pipeline. CAE adoption appears to serve as a gateway to broader encoding intelligence. For the 30% without formal QA, they are not just behind on measurement; they are likely missing the optimization wave reshaping streaming economics.

The Biggest Roadmap Blockers Are Not Technical
One of the more revealing sections of the report examines what is actually preventing organizations from executing their 2026 encoding roadmaps. The top constraints are capital and budget limitations (39%) and limited team capacity (38%). Device and technology support comes in at 30%, cost-per-channel pressure at 30%, and integration/API gaps at just 10%.

In other words, 77% of respondents cite at least one organizational barrier, compared to just 19% citing a purely technical one. This shows the bottleneck is not the technology. It is the budget to buy it and the team capacity to implement it. This matters because the data elsewhere in the report shows that 49% of all respondents have video engineering teams of 1 to 5 people. Even among companies with 5,000+ employees, small video teams are not uncommon. When the report says lean teams are the norm across all company size brackets, it has real implications for how vendors should think about integration complexity, time to value, and operational overhead.

Edge Encoding: High Interest, Low Conviction
42% of respondents expressed interest in deploying encoding at the edge, while 30% remain uncertain. This represents the largest undecided cohort on any topic in the survey. Only 29% said they are not interested at all. Among those interested, the top use cases are localized ladder generation (56%) and dynamic ad insertion (48%).

Edge interest follows a U-shaped curve by company size. Small companies (46%) and large enterprises (43%) show the highest interest, while mid-market firms lag at 26–28%. Interest also correlates with operational scale: 50% of organizations running 250+ live channels are interested, compared with 35% at smaller scales. The data suggests edge economics become more compelling as encoding volume increases, regardless of overall company size. But the 30% uncertainty band represents the biggest market education opportunity in the survey. These organizations see the potential but lack the information or confidence to commit.

Live event operators show the strongest interest in edge, at 44%, driven by latency requirements for real-time delivery. This aligns with what I have been hearing from operators at industry events—edge latency is becoming a competitive differentiator for sports and live entertainment. The report suggests that vendors who can reduce ambiguity through reference architectures, concrete use cases, and trial programs will convert undecided prospects faster than those who lead with product specs.

Who Responded and Why It Matters
Before drawing too many conclusions from any survey, it is worth understanding who completed it. Live events and sports broadcasting represent the single largest vertical at 35%, followed by subscription VOD at 18%, AVOD/FAST at 7%, and enterprise communications at 6%. Combined streaming verticals: live sports, SVOD, AVOD, and UGC represent 65% of the sample. EMEA leads geographically at 44%, followed by North America at 40%. The report is transparent about its limitations. Survey distribution through industry channels and NETINT’s network may overweight organizations already evaluating hardware encoding solutions. APAC (19%) and LATAM (16%) are underrepresented relative to their share of global streaming growth. These are fair caveats and worth keeping in mind when interpreting the data.

The combination of executive-level respondents with real budget authority and hands-on engineers with operational experience makes this one of the more credible encoding industry surveys I have reviewed. The fact that nearly half the respondents are VP-level or above means the stated priorities and investment plans are not aspirational wish lists from mid-level managers—they reflect where actual dollars are going.

The report runs more than 50 pages and covers codec adoption, hardware acceleration, AI/ML integration, quality measurement, cost structures, and organizational archetypes. The full report is available from NETINT here. It includes detailed archetype analysis of four distinct organizational segments, build-versus-buy economics, executive priority rankings, and projections. For a vendor-sponsored survey, NETINT deserves credit for producing something with analytical depth.

Due to rising costs for servers, RAM, SSDs, and energy, Akamai has notified customers and partners of upcoming interim surcharges and pricing adjustments for contract renewals. Akamai shared candid data with me on the massive economic pressures they are seeing across their supply chain and the specific market drivers behind the updated pricing.

While CDN pricing has declined steadily for years, the current hardware and energy markets are forcing a shift. Akamai provided a detailed explanation of why they are implementing adjustments to account for what they describe as significant market-driven forces. They noted that over the years, Akamai has worked hard to maintain economic stability for its customers and partners amid rising global infrastructure costs. However, they are now introducing what they call a modest adjustment in response to the economic pressures reshaping the industry.

According to the data Akamai provided, the cost of server components has spiked significantly since October 2025. Specifically, their market costs for RAM have more than doubled, and SSD pricing has seen significant increases. Due to ongoing supply shortages, Akamai noted that server costs increased between 75% and 200% compared to the first half of 2025. These hardware costs are not stabilizing. In fact, they are continuing to climb on an almost monthly basis. This aligns with recent industry analysis, with some analyst firms noting that end-user prices for memory and storage could rise by 150% to 300% or more in 2026 and 2027, compared to 2025 levels.

Hardware is not the only factor, with Akamai noting that energy costs increased by more than 200% in many regions. Personnel costs are also rising significantly, as the market for highly talented engineering and services talent remains highly competitive. Given the growth in server costs over the past few months and a forecast for double-digit increases to continue into 2026, the company explained that it can no longer absorb these costs while maintaining the same performance and security standards.

To address this, Akamai is implementing two specific changes:

• Interim Surcharge: Effective April 1, 2026, a 3% surcharge will be passed through to customers and partners.
• Renewal Adjustments: Akamai will incorporate a price adjustment of up to 10% on contract renewals to reflect the current cost environment.

In response to my questions about what they have done internally to offset these costs, Akamai was clear that they are working to mitigate the impact through a variety of internal optimizations. This included org structure adjustments and migrating their own internal workloads to Akamai Cloud to significantly reduce third-party cloud spend.

Ultimately, Akamai views this decision as an operational necessity to maintain the security and performance levels its customers require. The company noted that these changes are required to fund the ongoing costs of infrastructure, maintenance, and innovation associated with managing increasingly sophisticated cloud and edge services.

While nobody likes cost pressures, this is clearly a systemic issue across the infrastructure market, not isolated to Akamai. We are seeing similar moves from other players. Hetzner recently announced price increases of up to 50% for its services, and OHVcloud has implemented similar measures. This reflects broader market realities, where every provider is facing the same spike in server and power costs, and the current cost environment is likely to continue into 2027. I will continue to track how other CDNs and cloud providers respond to these same supply chain pressures.

In conjunction with Super Bowl LX, Comcast’s Xfinity announced the launch of what they call “RealTime4K”, a new ultra-low-latency technology with a 30 Mbps bitrate supporting Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos, compatible with an Xfinity X1 XG1v4 or Xi6 TV Box, or an XiOne streaming TV Box for Xfinity Flex. Comcast is positioning RealTime4K as a 4K delivery architecture designed specifically for premium live sports and optimized for both speed and visual fidelity. Unlike traditional 4K streams that rely heavily on compression, the technology is engineered to reduce latency while maintaining high-bitrate video and immersive audio formats. While the brand name to consumers uses the term 4K, it’s important to note that it is not native 4K and that Comcast’s source feed is 1080p HDR.

Comcast’s RealTime4K uses DASH and HLS to stream to set-top boxes, and via the Xfinity Stream app, compatible customer-owned streaming devices (Xumo Stream Box, Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku, Samsung and LG TVs) can also get the 30 Mbps stream but without the ultra-low-latency functionality. Comcast set-top boxes further use low-latency DASH (LL-DASH) to remove delays introduced by segment packaging and client-side buffers.

For the encoding pipeline, Comcast uses HEVC and Dolby Vision Profile 8.1, with a bitrate ladder that caps at 30 Mbps and supports full 4K resolution on both the first and second rungs. And since last year’s Super Bowl, Comcast has integrated the latest Dolby Vision improvements into its encoding pipeline. For audio encoding, Comcast RealTime4K always includes Dolby Atmos, natively produced when available from the content provider and, otherwise, upmixed by Comcast. Comcast encodes Atmos at 768 Kbps and delivers it as DD+JOC.

For Super Bowl LX, Comcast partnered with NBCUniversal and used a JPEG-XS source feed. Typical 4K live events are compressed to 50-70 Mbps using HEVC before being sent to distributors. Using JPEG-XS at over 300 Mbps allowed Comcast to avoid a generation of HEVC encoding, significantly improving picture quality and reducing latency by about 5 seconds in the video production pipeline.

The core of Comcast’s RealTime 4K video pipeline is a DASH live ingest, powered distribution transcoder, and CMAF linear origin. The transcoder accepts JPEG-XS as input (or HEVC mezzanine when JPEG-XS isn’t available) and generates all needed renditions while minimizing overall delay. The transcoder publishes each chunk of media, as it is encoded, to the CMAF linear origin. The origin provides access to DASH manifests and segments to both the just-in-time packager (JITP) for live playback and Comcast’s Cloud DVR system. Comcast has partnered with MediaKind for transcoding while building its own CMAF linear origin and JITP. For Super Bowl LX, Comcast used its on-premises CDN to deliver the RealTime4K feed, but also uses the same LL-DASH video architecture to power partner systems using public CDNs such as Akamai and CloudFront.

Beyond the architectural claims, Comcast also put RealTime4K into a live, high-stakes environment during a full day of Olympics and Super Bowl coverage, plus streaming coverage on Peacock, making Sunday, February 8, the most-trafficked day ever for video streaming on Comcast’s network. According to internal testing Comcast conducted during the event, the RealTime4K feed on Xfinity delivered latency that was between 9 and 49 seconds ahead of vMVPD streaming services, even as the network experienced its most-trafficked day for video streaming to date, driven by a mix of IP video streams (including the RealTime4K feed) and streaming on Peacock and other platforms. During my testing of the Super Bowl LX stream, I was unable to test Comcast’s RealTime4K latency myself, as I am not in Comcast’s footprint; otherwise, I would have included them in my Super Bowl LX  latency chart.

As of today, Comcast RealTime4K technology is free for all customers, with the primary limitation being the hardware requirements for the ultra-low-latency verison of the stream. For customers who do not currently have compatible hardware, the company is offering device swaps to 4K-enabled Xfinity equipment at no additional cost. Customers can also visit a nearby Xfinity store to exchange their existing X1 TV box for a 4K-capable one.

Comcast is positioning RealTime4K as the preferred delivery model for live 4K events going forward, not just for showcase events like the Super Bowl, and is already in talks with other programming partners to bring this technology to their live 4K events this year. The company has also emphasized its ongoing commitment to continuous network improvement, focusing on further optimizing delivery, throughput, and video pipelines to push the limits of video quality, latency, and immersive live-viewing performance.

If you have had an opportunity to check out the RealTime4K tech at your home, please feel free to share your experience in the comments. I’ll be hands-on with the technology and offering soon, and will provide updates to this post once I see it in person.

Netskrt Systems has carved out a meaningful foothold in the global streaming video market, particularly tier-one live events such as NFL football games, supporting both TNF on Prime Video and the recent Super Bowl on Peacock. It has done this in a manner unlike most of its competitors, focusing on broad, deep deployment of pure software POP instances that reduce its underlying costs. The cost factor is the key, since historically we have seen CDN vendors grow capacity at the risk of burning a lot of cash.

The net result, the company tells me, is the ability to operate profitably under the demanding price umbrellas imposed by global streaming platforms. And this does show up in its numbers. Netskrt has built far more capacity and generated more revenue with less invested capital than its CDN peers, at its current size. With about $30 million in invested capital, Netskrt expects to exceed a 1:1 capital-to-revenue ratio in 2026 and a 1:4 capital-to-capacity ratio. Conventional CDNs typically operate closer to a higher multiple, but few disclose the ratios publicly.

Netskrt informs me that its current “steady state” capacity is about 65 Tbps, but notes that because software instances can be spun up when and where required, whether on bare metal, virtual machines, or containers, the effective capacity that can be instantiated in 24 to 48 hours is substantially greater. In fact, when it wants to, Netskrt said it can even spin up capacity in cloud-based spot instances in minutes.

This approach, which the company likens to a software-defined CDN, gives Netskrt considerable flexibility while also taking a sledgehammer to capital costs. Further, it’s a stratified infrastructure. Where Netskrt sees persistent, long-lasting demand for capacity, it can deploy iron to meet that demand in a manner that leans more toward CapEx than OpEx. Where it sees the reverse—in particular, the bleeding edge of spiky demand curves associated with live sports that are inherently seasonal, it can lean in the opposite direction. Executing this is more than just a business strategy; Netskrt says it requires CDN technology capable of positioning and repositioning content, as well as live-streaming POPs, in response to a complex array of real-time conditions.

Roughly half of Netskrt’s capacity is embedded in last-mile ISP networks, with the balance allocated to its mid- and global tiers. From a geographic perspective, Netskrt now reaches across North America, South America, Europe and regions in APAC. Netskrt’s current growth trajectory, which has picked up significantly over the last year, will see it reach 150 Tbps by the end of 2026. Their partnerships with large network and bare metal suppliers like Lumen enable them to ramp up to these levels quite quickly.

The company recently conducted a survey with professionals from 55 global ISPs to better understand how major events impact network performance. You can check out the results from that study here.

I’m testing DAZN’s stream of Super Bowl LX, available to NFL Game Pass subscribers outside the US for just £0.99, and the stream looks great. DAZN is taking the NBC international feed in 1080p at 59.94 fps HLG with 5.1, and streaming it in 1080p HDR, not upscaled 4K. I am streaming the DAZN feed in the U.S. using their Swedish app, with their help. Here’s details on the encoding specs:

• The HDR10 ABR ladder peaks at 1080p 59.94fps 8mbps HEVC main10 level 4.1. The HDR10 ladder has 29.97fps in the lower profiles under 3 Mbps.
• The SDR ABD ladder peaks at 1080p59.94 8mbps AVC high profile level 4.2. The SDR ladder has 29.97fps in the lower profiles under 3 Mbps.
• Surround sound in Dolby 5.1: Two EAC-3 profiles at 256kbps and 192kbps
• Stereo: Two AAC-LC profiles in 128kbps and 64kbps

DAZN is acquiring NBC’s feeds for the pre-game, game, halftime and post-game coverage in HDR 5.1 and SDR 5.1 via Encompass in Atlanta, which are then on-passed to DAZN’s regional production facilities worldwide for German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Japanese commentary, and delivered to select local markets via the DAZN app. DAZN’s playout facility uses Amagi for real-time graphics, promos, and ad insertion and the OTT streams are generated by M2A Media and Mediakind in 1080p 59.94fps HDR10 with Dolby 5.1 and 1080p 59.94fps SDR with stereo.

Akamai, CloudFront, and Fastly are delivering the stream across 200+ territories, with DAZN’s monitoring facilities in Leeds, Bangor and Hyderabad monitoring the feeds end-to-end.

Thanks to DAZN for setting up my account so I could watch the stream and test across devices.

*The photo is taken with my iPhone, and does not represent the actual quality of the video stream that viewers receive.

I’ve been testing the Super Bowl LX stream on Sunday, starting with the pre-game stream at 1pm, across more than 25 devices and platforms, documenting video quality, latency, and other technical metrics. You can jump here for my latest comments during the game. (2025 Super Bowl blog post here)

During the game, I am monitoring Reddit boards for Peacock, Fire TV, YouTube TV, Roku, and others, as well as Twitter hashtags, to see what viewers are saying about their streaming quality. I’m also talking to a few ISPs in the U.S. who provide me with details on the traffic they are seeing across their networks. Jump here for a list of all the platforms and devices I am testing.

[And that’s a wrap! While it will be a few days before we have detailed viewership numbers, NBC Sports and Peacock executed what I would consider a near-perfect Super Bowl stream. And it’s important to highlight that while producing a Super Bowl is already hard work, NBC Sports did so while also producing the Winter Olympics, with 17 hours of programming straight. Kudos to the entire NBCU/Peacock team. Many will get no rest as a week from today, NBC Sports will produce the NBA All-Star Weekend onsite in Los Angeles.]

NBC Sports’ stream of Super Bowl LX requires a Peacock Premium plan and is available on the NBC Sports website and app, with authentication via pay-TV credentials. Peacock doesn’t offer free trials, so anyone who wants to stream the Super Bowl on Peacock will need to pay for an account or, in the U.S., have YouTube TV, Sling TV, DirecTV,  or Hulu + Live TV. Fubo is currently in a carriage dispute with NBCU, so the game won’t be on Fubo. The game is also available via OTA and will be broadcast on Telemundo and Universo. Outside the U.S., NFL Game Pass is offered via DAZN, and users can stream the Super Bowl for just £0.99. If there is anything you want me to test during the game, please put it in the comments on this LinkedIn Post.

Tech Specs
The Peacock stream is in “upscaled” 4K HDR; it is not native 4K, and I see many news outlets reporting it is in “true 4K HDR,” implying it is being captured in 4K when it isn’t. Also, this is not the “first time” the Super Bowl has been in upscaled 4K. I understand why some people are reporting that online, since, unlike the broadcast world, where there is a standard, streamers all define 4K differently. The NBC Sports press release was very clear when it said, “This marks the first time a Super Bowl and Olympic Games will be presented in 4K HDR on the NBC broadcast network and the Peacock streaming service.” It’s the first time on NBC’s platform that BOTH events are offered in upscaled 4K HDR, not the first time an “upscaled” 4K Super Bowl stream has been offered.

NBC Sports has deployed 22 mobile units from NEP Group, 145 cameras, 130 microphones, 75 miles of cable, and a team of more than 700 employees on-site. NBC’s contribution feed is 1080p 59.94 fps PQ with 5.1. and international partners are getting the same, but in HLG. Dolby is also upscaling the audio to Dolby Atmos, but not all devices support 4K and Atmos. You can see a list of all currently supported devices here. Akamai, CloudFront, Fastly, Comcast, Google Media CDN, and Netskrt are delivering the video for Peacock, and Akamai, CloudFront, and Fastly are delivering the video for DAZN outside the U.S.

Encoding:

• MPEG-DASH stream using CMAF-packaged fragmented MP4 with AES-CTR Common Encryption and multi-DRM (Widevine + PlayReady), protected by session-scoped CDN access tokens
• MPD manifest provides a 2-hour DVR window
• HD stream encoding bitrate ladder: (H.264)
  • 512×288 ~350 kb/s
  • 768×432 ~860 kb/s
  • 960×540 ~1.85 Mb/s
  • 960×540 ~3.0 Mb/s
  • 1280×720 ~4.8 Mb/s
  • 1920×1080 ~7.8 Mb/s
  • 1920×1080 ~10 Mb/s
  • Audio: AAC-LC stereo 48 kHz ~128 kb/s
  • Audio: E-AC3 (Dolby Digital Plus) 5.1 ~384 kb/s
• 4k stream encoding bitrate ladder: (HEVC)
  • 640×360 ~500 kb/s
  • 960×540 ~1.0 Mb/s
  • 1280×720 ~2.5 Mb/s(59.94 fps)
  • 1920×1080~5.8 Mb/s(59.94 fps)
  • 3840×2160 ~10.0 Mb/s(59.94 fps)
  • 3840×2160 ~13.0 Mb/s(59.94 fps)
  • Audio: AAC-LC stereo 48 kHz ~128 kb/s
  • Audio: E-AC3+JOC Dolby Atmos 5.1.4 ~640 kb/s

Latency Testing Results
For latency testing, I ran the test 10x per device and app/platform and compared the results to the OTA feed from two antennas. Note that many factors affect the latency viewers experience, so my experience may not be representative of other users. Here’s the latency I saw across devices and platforms:

• Testing across three different illegal IPTV services averaged 58 seconds behind the OTA feed
• Sling TV app on Fire TV (ethernet): 59.4 seconds average behind the OTA feed
• Hulu+ Live TV app on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 34.2 seconds behind the OTA feed
• DIRECTV on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 52.8 seconds behind the OTA feed
• YouTube TV on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 28.3 seconds behind the OTA feed
• NFL+: Didn’t test

*I’ll add latency testing from YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, DIRECTV and NFL+ shortly.

Live Updates During The Game

10:37pm: NBCU says they had a rebuffer rate of 0.07% for the Peacock stream.

10:15pm: With the 2-minute warning, NBC Sports and Peacock executed what I would consider a near-perfect Super Bowl stream. My thanks to NBC Sports for help with some of the tech specs, and to others who provided details about their experience.

9:22pm: It’s the end of the third quarter, and all is still looking good with Peacock’s stream. Two ISPs tell me traffic on their network looks good, with an average bitrate of about 8.5 Mbps. It’s not record traffic for them, though, nor would we expect it to be, since the Peacock stream is not free, as it was last year on Tubi and FOX.

8:28pm: It seems that bad bunny is confusing Peacock’s English subtitling option.

8:20pm: I love that Peacock is giving viewers the option to catch up on key plays if you don’t want to watch the halftime show.

8:07pm: Added latency testing results across three different illegal IPTV services, which averaged 58 seconds behind the OTA feed. Sling TV app on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 59.4 seconds behind the OTA feed. Hulu+ Live TV app on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 34.2 seconds behind the OTA feed

7:35pm: Across Twitter, monitoring Peacock hashtags since kickoff, I see a dozen complaints about stream quality, but none have provided any useful details. Complaints are to be expected for any live stream, but no major issues are being reported in any large volume. The stream is looking great. I do see one user complaining about getting a message saying they need to update their app, and says that Peacock should not be rolling out app updates during the Super Bowl, which they did not do. Many complaints during live events are “user issues” rather than problems with the stream itself.

7:11pm: DAZN’s stream of Super Bowl LX, available to NFL Game Pass subscribers outside the US for just £0.99, looks good. DAZN is taking the NBC international feed in 1080p at 59.94 fps HLG with 5.1, and streaming it in 1080p HDR, not upscaled 4K. I am streaming the DAZN feed in the U.S. using their Swedish app, with their help. You can see the tech specs and full review here.

6:54pm: Peacock stream looks VERY good across Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, and iOS devices for me. Colors are perfect, and the upscaled 4K looks great and is not washed out.

6:40pm: I’m testing Peacock’s Super Bowl LX stream over a SpaceX Starlink Mini, and it’s not great. I’m getting 265 Mbps down and 22 ms latency. On an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2nd Gen, AFTKRT), there is significant buffering, and I never get more than 2.96 Mbps of throughput. The stream averages 28 seconds behind OTA. The Starlink app shows that I have no obstructions and that the dish is perfectly aligned. This is the first time I have tested Starlink for streaming video from an OTT service. I am curious to hear what others have experienced with a Starlink Mini, so please share your experience in the comments on this LinkedIn post.

6pm: Kickoff is supposed to be at 6:30pm. Starlink is downloading a software update, and then I will also have details on how the stream works over Starlink.

For reference, here is a breakdown of streaming viewership for previous Super Bowl webcasts, but don’t go by the graphic alone. There are many differences across the years in how viewership was measured. See this post for a complete breakdown: Super Bowl Streaming Viewership Numbers From 2014-2025.

For the 2025 Super Bowl, FOX reported a rebuffer rate of 0.5%, a 28% share of viewership in 4K, and peak CDN capacity of 135 Tbps. You can see a detailed post-event breakdown of their workflow here: FOX Technical Presentation Details the Super Bowl LIX Streaming Video Stack

Here’s a breakdown of what I will be testing, along with more details on my setup:

• ISPs: Starlink, Verizon (500 Mbps), Optimum (300Mbps)
• OTA: Channel Master FLATenna and Mohu Leaf 50 TV antennas
• Platforms: Peacock, Sling TV, YouTube TV, NFL+, Hulu + Live TV, DirecTV, DAZN (Google AI says Fubo will have the game, but they won’t due to the carriage dispute. Another AI fail.)
• Devices: Fire TV Stick/Cube (AFTMA08C15/AFTKM/S3L46N/K3R6AT/K2R2TE/GA5Z9L/A78V3N), Roku (3821X2, 3940X2, 4800, 3820, 3820CA2) Apple TV (A2843/A2169/A1842), DIRECTV Gemini (P21KW-500), iPads (6x different models), MacBooks (4x, all 2022 and newer), iPhone (14/15 Pro/16 Pro Max)
• TVs: LG (55C9AUA/65BXPUA/65NANO80T6A), Samsung (UN40F5500AF/QN65S90CAFXZA/QN1EF), Vizio (V4K65M-0804/V4K55M-0801), TCL Roku TV (65S451)
• All devices with ethernet or a supported ethernet adapter are being used, all other devices are on wifi
• Every device is running the lastest app and OS version available

Note: For those who have asked, I am not getting paid by anyone to cover the Super Bowl stream. I have done this for each Super Bowl since 2015.

From November 2024 to November 2025, CDN revenue grew month over month by close to 55%. The company said that over the past two years, it had reduced CDN pricing in some regions, but strong demand and new large customers drove rapid traffic growth, making streaming one of Gcore’s fastest-growing CDN segments. Gcore has 550+ employees, raised a $70 million Series A in 2024, and says both the company as a whole and the CDN business are cash flow positive.

Gcore also said that, with several providers exiting the market, the redistribution of a portion of customers’ traffic to new CDNs contributed to meaningful growth. The company ended 2023 with just under $76 million in revenue, up nearly 60% from two years earlier. The company ended the year with 200 Tbps of network capacity across 210 CDN PoPs globally. Gcore says it has $12 million in customer commitments to expand its network next year and expects to add 65 Tbps in the first half of 2026.

The company also provided a detailed regional breakdown of Gcore’s global traffic, with the largest being North America at 29.4%, Europe at 27%.3%, Asia at 13.5% and South America at 13.3%. The company says its proprietary caching engine enables ~0.9 Gbps per server core, and Gcore supports HLS/DASH, LL-HLS/LL-DASH, WebRTC, QUIC/gQUIC transport and GPU-accelerated encoding. The company was founded in 2014 and has been offering CDN services and compute at the edge since then, with DAZN and Microsoft among its clients. If you are attending the NAB Show, you can see them at the NAB Show Streaming Summit.

In one of the most detailed blog posts yet [3,200 words], Netflix describes the custom Origin Server it built for live. The sentence I like most states that Netflix took a platform originally built for VOD and simply “extended nginx’s proxy-caching functionality to address live-specific needs.” This goes against those who claim that Netflix can’t deliver live streaming at scale because it “wasn’t built for live,” and of course, contradicts all the public viewership data, with Netflix having successfully streamed live events with an AMA number in the tens of millions. There is so much great info in the post, so here’s just a few things I wanted to highlight:

Leveraging Netflix’s microservice platform priority rate limiting feature, the origin prioritizes live edge traffic over DVR traffic during periods of high load on the storage platform. To mitigate traffic surges, TTL cache control is used alongside priority rate limiting. When low-priority traffic is impacted, the origin instructs Open Connect to slow down and cache identical requests for 5 seconds by setting max-age = 5s, and returns an HTTP 503 error code. This strategy effectively dampens traffic surges by preventing repeated requests to the origin within that 5-second window.

Netflix’s combination of cache and highly available storage has met the demanding needs of its Live Origin for over a year, and the solution they built was significantly more expensive, but minimizing cost was not a key objective, and low latency with high availability was.

Netflix uses failover orchestrated at the server-side to reduce client complexity, with resilience achieved through redundant regional live streaming pipelines and implements epoch locking at the cloud encoder, which enables the origin to select a segment from either encoding pipeline.

Netflix’s redundant cloud streaming pipelines operate independently, encompassing distinct cloud regions, contribution feeds, encoder, and packager deployments to substantially mitigate the probability of simultaneous defective segments across the dual pipelines.

Millisecond grain caching was added to nginx to enhance the standard HTTP Cache Control, which only works at second granularity, a long time when segments are generated every 2 seconds.

Netflix’s enhanced cache invalidation and origin masking enable live streaming operations to hide known problematic segments from streaming clients once the bad segments are detected, protecting millions of streaming clients during the DVR playback window.

You can read the entire Netflix blog post here.

Stats Perform acquired the assets of the ultra-low-latency tech company Phenix Real Time Solutions for approximately $7 million, including 21 patents. Stats Perform also rehired most of the former employees, with approximately nine coming over. In June of 2025, VC firm KB Partners put the assets of Phenix Real Time Solutions up for sale after the company continued to lose money, to the tune of almost $10 million last year, on sales of about $4 million.

No vendor can survive by selling a low/ultra-low latency solution as a stand-alone offering, as it must be sold as part of a larger video platform. This is exactly why the asset acquisiton makes sense for Stats Perform, which offers data collection and predictive analysis services tied to fantasy sports and sports betting. Ultra-low-latency tech can also help prevent piracy, a topic Stats Perform is discussing with leagues, OTT platforms and rights holders.

In the betting world, ultra-low-latency tech is needed to improve fan engagement, and Stats Perform has customers including the Premier League, WTA, FIBA, La Liga, and Serie A. Stats Perform is also FIFA’s first-ever official global distributor for betting data and live streaming rights, so it will be interesting to watch if FIFA wants to leverage any of the tech within their services. I can also think of how the ULL tech might be used to keep video in sync within a multiview feed.

Stats Perform tells me that while Phenix’s WebRTC-based tech works really well, Phenix never built the platform to scale or be cost-effective. Phenix never shared many details about its costs, but it once admitted that its platform was not designed to support more than 500,000 concurrent streams and that the overhead was expensive, even when it wasn’t being used.

Stats Perform has relaunched the Phenix tech within its platform, having already cut operating costs in half and continues to scale the tech, further reducing costs. This is exactly how ULL technology should be deployed, as a feature of a larger platform, not as a stand-alone service. Stats Perform will be well-positioned to monetize the tech across its entire platform for teams, leagues, broadcasters, betting companies, and social media. Stats Perform dominates its industry with an annual run rate of more than $550 million, nearly 2,800 employees and owns more than 560 patents.

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.

Let this sink in. From December 25-27, five NFL games will be played, none of which will be broadcast nationally on TV, during some of the largest viewership windows. Netflix has two games on Christmas, Amazon has one, Peacock has one on the 27th, and the NFL Network has the other. Four games are streaming exclusively across three different platforms. Local NBC affiliates will show the exclusive game on Peacock, and all NFL games will be available OTA.

This shows just how much the NFL is relying on streaming services for distribution and for global reach, something broadcasters can’t provide. Netflix and Amazon have international rights to their Christmas games, except in a few territories, including Canada. All games will also be available internationally via DAZN, the league’s international partner for NFL Game Pass.

Netflix’s streams will not be in HDR, even though CBS is producing the games for Netflix. Peacock will be in HDR, as will Amazon’s, and NBC will produce Amazon’s Xmas game, just as they do for all of the TNF games.

I don’t expect record viewership this year for the NFL Xmas games, when compared to last year, since the 2025 matches aren’t as good. The Dallas Cowboys and Washington Commanders will kick things off at 1:00 PM on Netflix, followed by the Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Lions at 4:00 PM. All but the Lions have been eliminated from the playoffs. Things will switch to Amazon Prime for the final game, which features the Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos, but the Chiefs have already been eliminated, and Patrick Mahomes is out due to injury.

Netflix and Amazon have filed appeals with the Lazio Regional Administrative Court in Italy in respect to their CDNs. Last August, Italy’s Communications Regulatory Authority (Agcom) decided to extend the general authorisation requirement, under the Electronic Communications Code, on Netflix and Amazon, stating their CDNs should be regulated as telcos and pay network taxes.

As both Amazon and Netflix rightly point out, private CDN services should not be regulated like telcos, and Netflix states that “there is no legal basis to support it, and it is contrary to European and Italian law.” Agcom lacks a clear understanding of how private CDNs work; otherwise, they would know that CDNs are not electronic communications networks, and Netflix’s CDN does not carry any third-party data.

Agcom argues that CDNs are networks capable of transmitting signals and, therefore, are subject to authorization under the Electronic Communications Code. Netflix states that requiring the company to obtain a telecommunications operator’s license could result in servers being relocated elsewhere, requiring data to be delivered from further away and negatively impacting the viewing experience.

Rumors suggest that Agcom is considering adopting a regulation that takes into account the type of internet service in its decision and whether the EU, with the new Digital Networks Act, intends to move in the same direction.

For the past two days, I’ve been using Amazon’s new Vega OS-based Fire TV Stick, and I’m not impressed. Amazon claims the value of the latest model is “remarkably fast app launches,” but when tested against the Fire TV Stick Max, there’s no difference in speed.

I tested Netflix and Prime Video load times on both devices ten times each, and the average load time for Netflix on the Vega-based device was 14.03 seconds. On the Max device, the average time was 14.06 seconds. When testing Amazon’s Prime Video app, the average load time was 10.2 seconds on the Vega-based device and 11.3 seconds on the Max device. No customer is going to notice a fraction of a second in app loading times.

The Max device does boast better specs, featuring 2GB of memory and a Quad-core 2.0GHz processor, compared to the Select’s 1 GB and Quad-core 1.7 GHz. But according to Amazon, the Vega-based device doesn’t require as much memory or a faster processor because container apps in the cloud are streaming the actual app from Amazon’s cloud servers.

Setting up the device took nine minutes because the remote wouldn’t pair out of the box. It kept telling me to use new batteries, despite them being new from Amazon, as verified by a battery tester. The device required a software update as expected, followed by a four-minute restart. An hour after using the device, the remote decided to do a two-minute software update. The new Select device features a more rounded remote and has replaced the dedicated Hulu button with one for Peacock.

I’ve come across a few online mentions suggesting it is possible to sideload apps onto a Vega OS Fire TV device using a command-line interface similar to Android’s ADB utility; however, I don’t see how that is possible, and I haven’t seen anyone demonstrate it working in the wild. Unlike Android-based Fire TV devices, where you can turn on Developer Options in the About section, I’ve not found any way to do this on the Vega-based device. I “think” that only registered developers will be able to enable developer mode. Still, it’s unclear at this time, and I don’t know what the reference means in Amazon’s documentation when it lists a command for running an app that has been sideloaded.

For developers whose app is delivered via Amazon cloud app streaming, note that the Vega-based stick won’t support local device access, picture-in-picture, live TV EPG integration and continue watching row references. Amazon also notes that running the Fire OS app in a cloud container will cause the IP address seen by the developers’ content delivery network to not align with the IP address seen by the developers’ back-end servers. As a result, Amazon says local ad targeting may not function correctly, VPN inhibitors might be falsely triggered, other geo-fencing solutions might not function as expected, and High-traffic events might trigger denial of service attack warnings.

To address these problems, Amazon says apps can be configured to support IP tunneling, where all IP traffic is routed through the device. However, Amazon notes that enabling IP tunneling may increase lag in customer interactions and reduce the speed of content catalog browsing and other app interactions, which is why it is not enabled by default. Amazon advises developers to contact Developer Support if they encounter this problem, to request that their app be enabled with IP tunneling. This all sounds like a lot of work for the developers to ensure customers get the experience they expect, and I wonder how many developers will dedicate time to supporting a single Fire TV model.

For an understanding of how video playback in Amazon cloud app streaming works, Amazon’s developer page provides a detailed step-by-step: (copied word for word from Amazon’s page)

1. Customer UI interaction on device are sent to the app instance running on Fire OS in a cloud container.
2. A customer interaction with app instance results in a content play request.
3. App instance calls to developer CDN gets routed to on-device streaming player.
4. App instance uses MediaDRM and MediaCodec interfaces which are bridged to device streaming player.
5. Device media player fetches content from developer CDN.
6. Device streaming player sends non-AV payload to app instance for state synchronization.
7. Device streaming player decodes the AV payload using on-device secure video pipe.
8. Playback information is synchronized between device and media player in app instance context.
9. App instance streams UI to device client.
10. App instance UI is composited along with the video content and rendered on the device screen.

The Vega-based Fire TV Stick currently costs $14 more than the newest Fire TV Stick 4K model, although pricing varies based on whatever discount Amazon is running at the time. No consumer will choose the more expensive model simply because it runs on an OS owned by Amazon. Of course, Amazon’s pricing strategy could quickly change at any time, and I expect it will.

I believe it will enable Amazon to offer the cheapest Fire TV model ever, as Vega OS is a simpler platform that requires less from the device’s hardware compared to Fire OS. That should be just fine for consumers who don’t care and overlook the limited capabilities and limited app ecosystem. A significant limitation is that the Select device does not support live view picture-in-picture. If customers purchase it under the assumption that it’s faster than the Max device, they will be disappointed.

John Ourland reports that Apple is in the final stages of negotiations with F1, and wants F1 to shut down its streaming service F1 TV in the US as part of the deal. Rumors are that Apple would like to announce the agreement at the upcoming U.S. Grand Prix, taking place October 17-19 in Austin. Since last year, rumors have circulated that Apple would pay at least $150 million per year for the US rights, although this figure has not been confirmed. It was also previously reported that ESPN was still interested in Formula 1, but only if it could license select races, rather than the entire season.

Although many claim in their reporting that F1 TV is profitable, and Liberty Media may not want to shut it down, I have not seen the company release any data to confirm this. Liberty Media’s financial reports and earnings calls indicate that F1 TV is experiencing “continued growth in F1 TV subscriptions,” but the company has not provided specific profitability details for F1 TV. (Please correct me with a source in the comments if I am wrong.) F1 could also keep the F1 TV service running in the US, but change the offering by limiting the content just to race archives, or a similar format. A complete shutdown of the F1 TV service in the US may not be necessary to finalize a deal with Apple.

ESPN is giving up its US broadcast rights for Formula 1 at the end of the 2025 season, rights that Apple would acquire if a deal is reached. Halfway through the 2025 season, on July 8th, ESPN announced they were averaging 1.3 million viewers per race, up 7% over the season-to-date average from 2024. One of the most significant problems for any company licensing content is that Formula 1 races occur worldwide, and many take place early in the morning or overnight in the U.S. Outside the US, multiple companies hold the rights.

Sky Sports currently holds F1’s media rights for the UK, Germany, and Italy until at least 2029. And last year, F1 secured a new broadcast deal with BeIN Sports across the Middle East, North Africa (MENA) and Turkey through 2033, extended its contract with Viaplay in the Netherlands and Nordic countries through 2029, and signed a streaming platform, FanCode, in India through 2025. DAZN also acquired F1 rights in Portugal for the next three seasons.