We talk and write a lot about video streaming and how we can help companies achieve the vaunted trifecta of streaming performance: speed, reliability and flexible scalability. But aside from the ambitious descriptors, what do we actually mean when we talk about streaming when we break it down to its component parts?

The German television market is one of the most difficult in the world for new players to break into and for existing businesses to make new movements in.

There are a number of reasons for this, the first major issue being the strength of the public broadcasting industry in Germany. Free TV is still the dominant force throughout the region, meaning that the force of external innovation can be neutered, as it’s difficult to gain a foothold and make significant change.

A second major challenge to services looking to gain a foothold in the space is that the pay-TV space sees Sky as the absolute king, while streaming only services are all crushed under the combined weight of Amazon and Netflix - services so large with budgets so bottomless that they smother anyone else in the streaming arena.

Right now you may invest millions in server hardware to get the capacity you need. The norm is 10Gb per server, and building that out to scale can grow to be not only expensive but more difficult to maintain. Now, with Varnish Streaming Server in Varnish 6.0, you can upgrade your infrastructure to 100Gbit. But what does this mean?

A recent Strategy Analytics study, “TV’s Transformation: A Unified TV and Video Market Perspective”, predicts that consumer and advertising spend on TV and video is going to increase markedly - and that this increase, from USD 490 billion in 2017 to USD 559 billion in 2022, will happen in large part due to over-the-top services (translating, according to the research, into up to 90% of the growth).