Verizon leads investment in Streamroot CDN tech
Details
Michelle Clancy
| 10 September 2017
| 10 September 2017

Verizon Ventures, Partech Ventures, TechStars Venture Capital Fund and R/GA have all thrown their weight behind start-up Streamroot’s video content delivery technology, raising $3.2 million in an early-stage financing round.


Streamroot, which was founded in 2013, uses mesh networks to increase server capacity for OTT and broadband TV providers. To date, it has raised $6 million in venture funding.

Its ‘secret sauce’ is the addition of a peer-to-peer layer to content delivery that makes use of WebRTC. Today’s CDNs are hub-and-spoke, where streaming video is delivered from an edge server to each endpoint in a unicast fashion. Streamroot’s technology instead makes it possible for a stream (or part of a stream) to be delivered from a nearby user instead, rather than sending multiple copies of the packets from a centralised server. It’s a much more efficient approach, and companies like Dailymotion, Canal+, Eurosport and Russia Today are all already on board. In all, Streamroot powers 400 million video sessions per month.

It’s a boon for service providers, who are looking for more cost-effective and efficient ways to deliver video amid exponentially growing viewership, which drives escalating demand for the finite resource of bandwidth.

“Traditional server-based content delivery (CDN) is no longer adapted to colossal worldwide audiences and the demand for ever-higher definition,” said Streamroot CEO Pierre-Louis Theron. “Streamroot, meanwhile, scales naturally to audiences anywhere of any size. Using intelligent mesh networks and dynamic multi-sourcing of content, we offer both a more reliable and cost-effective solution for broadcasters, and heightened quality for users.”