Introducing iStreamPlanet Aventus

As I glance at my blog I realize it’s been 7 months since my last post, which is probably as good of a sign as any that I should probably finally tell you a little bit about what I’ve been up to since I left Microsoft. 🙂

iStreamPlanet, for most of its 13-year history, has been predominantly a streaming service company, focused on providing the best-in-breed streaming media services for live events and live linear channels: live signal ingest, video encoding (live and VOD), origin server hosting, DRM packaging and licensing, video workflow automation, Xbox app development, etc. A little over a year ago, iStreamPlanet decided to diverge and invest (thanks to its Series A investors) into something brand new, aiming to reduce the complexity of live video delivery workflow through software development – and that’s how Aventus was born.

Aventus officially marks iStreamPlanet’s foray into the live video encoder market. Aventus is a software-based live video encoder designed to run specifically in virtualized environments (currently Microsoft Hyper-V) on x86-64 commodity hardware and focused exclusively on IP-based video delivery scenarios. It’s different from most other live video encoders in that:

• It supports only IP-based signal ingest (e.g. M2TS/UDP, RTMP) and therefore isn’t burdened with legacy support of video capture hardware devices
• It’s focused primarily on over-the-top delivery: it outputs only modern, HTTP-based adaptive streaming protocols such as Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HTTP Live Streaming, Adobe HDS and (eventually) MPEG-DASH
• It’s designed from ground up to work in virtualized environments, allowing it to take advantage of grid computing and to easily scale resources according to need, deployable in either private data centers or public clouds
• It’s entirely CPU-based, which means that it can run on any x86-64 commodity hardware thus significantly reducing capital costs for customers looking to build out their live encoding capacity

Last 9 months have been a thrilling experience and I look forward to being able to announce more details about Aventus v1.0 at the upcoming IBC Show in Amsterdam next month.

Last but not least… We are hiring! We are currently looking for talented C++ and C# developers with experience in digital media (codecs, formats, DSPs) who are passionate about streaming media and who would enjoy working on a v1 live video encoder product. Our software engineering team is located in Redmond, Washington. If you are interested, please contact me by e-mail and include your resume and/or LinkedIn profile link.