Dan Rayburn's StreamingMediaBlog.com is the leading independent source of news, analysis, and market data for the online video and streaming media industry. The blog is widely recognized for its authoritative coverage of business trends, OTT business models, and content delivery architectures, often cited by major financial media and Wall Street. Dan Rayburn's deep industry expertise and independent analysis provide buyers with trusted, unbiased insights that are critical for strategic decision-making in the rapidly evolving streaming landscape. The platform's focus on actionable market data and vendor-neutral commentary sets it apart from promotional industry content.
The CDN industry is facing stagnant revenue growth driven by customer consolidation, in-house delivery shifts by major platforms, and optimized encoding bitrates. Delivery costs are rising due to increased infrastructure and power expenses, causing pricing to stabilize rather than decline.
A report indicates that Content Adaptive Encoding (CAE) has nearly identical adoption rates across live (25%) and VOD (28%) workflows. This parity in adoption is highlighted as the clearest indicator of CAE's usage patterns.
StreamingMediaBlog.com published an Excel sheet listing nearly 50 in-person conferences and events covering the streaming media industry worldwide. The resource was created in response to frequent requests for such a list.
Robert Schildhouse, CEO of BBC Studios' DTC business, discussed BritBox's 'Anti-Netflix' strategy at the NAB Streaming Summit, emphasizing profitability over scale and a focus on niche British content for North American audiences. He highlighted the success of BritBox Premier and the prioritization of annual subscribers, noting experimentation with aggregation and bundles through partnerships with Starz, MGM+, and Hallmark.
Netflix's Standard With Ads plan now has over 250 million monthly active users, an increase from 190 million in November 2025. The company expects its ad business to double this year, reaching $3 billion in revenue, and will expand the ad-supported plan to 15 more countries next year.
The article reviews updates to Google Media CDN over the past year, including a reported tripling of delivery capacity since early 2025 by combining Media CDN and YouTube capacity, with a focus on handling live-streaming traffic spikes. Google added caching/routing options such as Flexible Shielding with new shield regions (South Africa, Middle East, U.S.), expanded origin compatibility (HEAD support, larger max segment size, multi-part range requests), and introduced monthly savings plans for more predictable costs. It also launched a Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) offering aimed at providing real-time, event-focused operational visibility from origin to end-user metrics.
Akamai informed customers and partners that it will introduce interim surcharges and pricing adjustments on contract renewals, citing sharp increases in server component and energy costs since late 2025. The company says it will apply a 3% surcharge effective April 1, 2026, and up to a 10% price adjustment on renewals, alongside internal cost-mitigation efforts such as migrating workloads to Akamai Cloud. The article frames the move as part of broader infrastructure market inflation, noting similar price increases from providers like Hetzner and OVHcloud.
Comcast’s Xfinity has launched RealTime4K, an ultra-low-latency, 30 Mbps upscaled 4K delivery architecture for premium live sports, debuting with Super Bowl LX and supporting Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos on specific Xfinity set-top and streaming boxes. The system uses HEVC with Dolby Vision, JPEG-XS contribution feeds, LL-DASH, CMAF origin infrastructure, and an on-prem CDN (plus public CDNs like Akamai and CloudFront for partners) to reduce end-to-end latency and improve picture quality versus traditional 4K workflows. Comcast plans to make RealTime4K its preferred model for future live 4K events and is offering compatible hardware upgrades to customers at no additional cost.
The article details how CDN provider Netskrt Systems has built a 65 Tbps software-defined CDN footprint, with roughly half its capacity embedded in last-mile ISP networks and global reach across the Americas, Europe, and parts of APAC. By relying on broadly deployed software POP instances and a stratified CapEx/OpEx infrastructure strategy, Netskrt claims it can profitably support major live events like NFL games on Prime Video and the Super Bowl on Peacock while targeting a better capital-to-revenue and capital-to-capacity ratio than traditional CDNs. The company projects reaching 150 Tbps by the end of 2026, aided by partnerships with network and bare metal providers such as Lumen.
The article live-blogs NBC's 2026 Super Bowl livestream across more than 25 devices and OTT platforms, documenting how the event is delivered over streaming infrastructure. It focuses on detailed technical specifications and performance characteristics of the live stream implementation.
