How streaming platforms are born
By Stephen Hoogendijk
I’ve been working at mycujoo for a little over 2 and half years now. I was one of the very first employees, starting as the lead devops engineer with the initial mission to help scaling our platform and facilitating its growth.
And grown it has. We started with one streaming server back then, now we’re close to a hundred of them. In early 2016 we had a few content partners streaming a few matches, a couple hundred thousands of monthly visitors. Now we are closing in on 20,000 matches streamed for the year and our monthly users are in the millions.
And then, I was the platform or pretty much close to it. I used to maintain it entirely. We were five people in total. Couple of years later, we’re more than 70 contributing to mycujoo, including 20 in the tech area.
This growth — the holy grail of the startup — comes with its challenges, both functionally and personally…
1. In the beginning, streaming is about being alive
When I joined it was a small office in the centre of Amsterdam, more like a living room than an office really, with a multipurpose small kitchen / lunch room / meeting room.
My role and challenge was basically to keep the platform alive, making sure it was working at all times so we could deploy and run our software. It was purely about automation.
So I built a first streaming platform, which evolved slowly in the course of 2016/2017. This is the platform that is still in use today. And of course, in pure scale, we had to adapt to new technologies and started to think different, to serve the platform to millions of users instead of tens of thousands.
For a streaming company, you need streaming, that’s obvious right? We build everything in-house. The first platform, I built using proprietary software. In the new platform we use only our own platform and some open source software. We use a combination of open source software and mostly self written codebase, that allows us to be more flexible in terms of what we deliver to our customers and allows us to really fine-tune the quality of the platform, optimise and grow it towards the needs of our customers.
What is very important is that we have the freedom, we have the freedom to change, to go with any provider that we want, content delivery wise etc, that is our biggest strength.
It can scale to an immense size. Other strengths are cost optimisation, freedom of choice, pluggability.
Back in those days it was the kind of crazy, exhilarating experience people may fantasise about early startups. Once I was on a beach in Thailand and got a call from a colleague — the platform is down! we need your help! I was like, I’m on a beach in Thailand with just my phone. They asked me to fix it with my phone and I did! I installed a bunch of apps, logging from a remote server, and my girlfriend is asking me “what the hell are you doing?”. It was hectic, fixing things on your phone with the feet in the sand, next thing I did was jumping in the ocean! But the good thing is, this was in the very early stages, it’s not like that anymore.
2. Then, streaming is about growing
The platform I initially built, we are now slowly replacing it with what we call here “the new streaming platform”. This complex piece of machinery has been in development for about one and a half year. The focus is to bring the best possible streaming experience to our end users.
First, the new platform is developed fully in-house. It means we can build it up ourselves, and push live streaming further our own way, with new features implemented as we want it. Let’s say, if our partners wanted 4K streaming, we wouldn’t be able to do it now because of the scale of the platform. With the new one, yes.
It means more flexibility, more features, we can integrate new in-house technologies such as AI and auto-panning. We can offer lower latency, better quality, all while continuously facilitating the growth.
As a content partner, you won’t notice it directly, but the impact is important — and that is even before adding the notion that this will also contribute to a more stable platform.
It is a ripple effect. To continue to develop more features for our existing partners, we need, business wise, to grow our number of partners and content and audiences. In order to facilitate the growth for everybody, and to be able to offer the same consistent quality all across the board for every single partner that we have, it is absolutely essential that we have such a foundation in place.
If we don’t introduce this capacity, offering certain current features wouldn’t even be possible. It would become too costly for us, and we’d have to reflect that in our offer to partners, currently cost-less. One of our goals is low latency while dealing with a global market where we have to optimise the viewer experience across the world. In some countries, the chances for viewers to watch a stream in 1080p or even 720p with 24 or 35 frames per second are quite low… and if we start shortening the delay to 10 seconds, technically we can do it, if we wanted to, with our new platform we could reduce to 0.5 seconds delay even. But for viewers — we would have to take away the live DVR capacity for instance.
0.5 seconds delay is actually on our roadmap for specific purposes though — data driven, not for the public facing platform. We may or may not have long term goals around being able to proceed the DVR feed and the low latency feed together as separate entities in our media player… but these are things we are conceptualising slowly while working on our core priorities.
3. Finally, streaming is about withstanding… to keep growing
It would be so easy to say “hey, let’s go Google-scale, work up a thousand servers” and then we could do whatever we want. The platform would be unbeatable, but we don’t have those resources. We have to be extremely cost conscious. Why? Because we are not working with premium contents that bring immediate revenues to reinvest. We are working with long tail football, developing streaming tech around video content we are the first to value.
This is a big challenge — building up the platform and be cost efficient while doing it.
As a non-football person, it’s always kind of surprising to see how big the scale is for this kind of content. This is something that is definitely a challenge and we need to keep it in mind all the time when we’re building something, because we don’t test just for the one person. We test for a massive amount of people. We know how to build solutions that can withstand these numbers of users.
The streaming piece that I work on with my team is a core technology that people rely on 24/7 to work. It needs to work all the time. There are many factors that make it complex: the fact that it’s someone in a busy stadium, on a 4G connection, trying to send a stream to us. We need to think how we can get that video perfectly from that point to us. We are constantly tweaking, optimising, and a lot of knowledge comes out of this. We recently visited a dutch broadcaster, we talked with them about the lessons we learned, and they were genuinely impressed, them, as a big broadcaster.
In the Netherlands, and even globally, knowledge about streaming is a bit of a black box and we are positioning ourselves to be a reference.
And this comes from the freedom we have. Do your thing, think for yourself, it’s essential for this job. Think. It’s the biggest reason I walk happily and excited when I go to work. If I come up with an idea, I tell someone about it — there is no pushback and there shouldn’t be any. The culture fosters good ideas, choices.
Final thoughts
When a streaming platform is born, it is like “you’re on holiday… but you have to have your laptop with you at all times”. The pressure is very high. You rely only on your own strength and knowledge.
We are now at a scale where people can safely go on vacation and (in theory) disconnect. The streaming will not stop. And yet, people remain a key part of the project. As a matter of fact, I do not feel that my role has become any less important, really. You need to keep in mind that you’re contributing to the future of this company. In that way, you are essential — everyone is.
And of course it feels different but at the same time, going from 4/5 people to over 50 now, if you are able to grow with it while maintaining your positive attitude, it is an unique opportunity.
The one big difference I notice, now that our platform has grown up? I now have the opportunity to slow down a little. And it is good — the more I slow down, the more comfortable I am in my role, in what I deliver.
It is fun, exciting, there is never a day that is the same.
