StreamZilla
On Friday 4 November 1994, Gerad Harens, Rudo de Jong and Stef van der Ziel streamed a concert from the upper bar of Simplon in Groningen onto the world wide web. With a Mac Performa 630, an analogue video mixer and a 28k8 modem, they sent one or two small images per second, without sound. Four people watched. It was the first live video stream on the web.
From that experiment grew Jet-Stream: a streaming CDN in 1997, Full HD streaming in 2002, live mobile streaming in 2003 and one of Europe’s first OTT services in 2004. In 2003 Jet-Stream launched StreamZilla, which became a leading video hosting service in the Benelux.
Thirty-two years on, StreamZilla returns, rebuilt from scratch: European video hosting under European law, compliant with the GDPR and WCAG 2.2 AA, on green European infrastructure, with no AI training on customers’ videos. Videos up to 4K are processed automatically, with subtitles and transcripts. In its own assessment against the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework, the platform scores the highest level, SEAL-4, on seven of the eight objectives. Forty organisations are testing it in a free private beta that runs until 31 December 2026.
“Thirty years ago we helped push aside the gatekeepers of the airwaves.”
Source: Published on stefvanderziel.nl on 4 November 2026.