(Courtesy of PhenixP2P)
There’s a void in the live streaming and video marketplace, and it’s one that PhenixP2P is trying to fill.
According to Chief Marketing Officer Jed Corenthal, the Chicago-based startup and live streaming provider is a true vehicle to produce “real-time” content, with less than half a second in latency or lag as opposed to other streaming companies and networks like NeuLion, Facebook, Twitter and iStreamPlanet, among others.
He said that those companies may say they’re live but there’s still anywhere from a 10- to 60-second delay, even potentially longer. For major sporting events like the Super Bowl — where the FOX Sports Go App crashed during February’s game — Phenix would be able to better distribute concurrent streamers across its platform so those situations don’t arise and negatively impact a fan’s viewing experience.
“We’re really making a push to tell the market, ‘Live is live, and real-time is real-time. They are different,’” Corenthal said to SportTechie.
Added Phenix Chief Operating Officer Tripp Welge on the company blog: “We are excited to break into new markets and disrupt today’s standard content delivery methods in OTT television, eSports, social media, and online education. The future of real-time video streaming is now.”
Corenthal explained that PhenixP2P Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Stefan Birrer came to the United States in the late 1990s on a scholarship to Northwestern University where he studied peer-to-peer network broadcasts and live streaming, eventually earning Master’s and Doctorate degrees in computer science.
“(Stefan) was one of the true early pioneers in streaming video and the technology behind it,” Corenthal said, adding that Birrer was studying video and the back-end technology behind it before it was on anyone’s radar.
In September of 2013, Birrer co-founded PhenixP2P after looking at the marketplace and seeing two different streaming models, one being HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), as Corenthal explained. In short, HLS is a content delivery network that allows content publishers to stream to large audiences but with small to significant delays. And as more devices are added to the system, the lag increases.
On the flip side, another mechanism called webRTC allows publishers to stream in real-time but only to a few hundred or so viewers. PhenixP2P meshes the two systems together.
“When we looked at the market, one can get you there in real-time but only to a limited number of users while the other takes you to an unlimited number of users with a significant delay. That’s what precipitated (Birrer) into building a new platform from the ground up that accomplishes both. It gives publishers an opportunity to steam in real-time but also reach millions of concurrent users,” he added.
The first two and a half years of PhenixP2P were spent building the PCast end-to-end live streaming platform while the past 12 months have involved conversations with professional sports leagues and even some major football clubs overseas, according to Corenthal. Esports is also an area of focus for PhenixP2P. He didn’t give specifics when it came to current sports partners or those sports-related companies PhenixP2P was in conversations with, citing non-disclosure agreements.
Through a proprietary peer-assisted algorithm on top of its end-to-end solution, PhenixP2P can monitor for areas of internet congestion and know in real-time the fastest ways to connect sports fans with content. Corenthal gave an analogy that if eight highways of streaming and Internet traffic are congested while two are completely empty, then PhenixP2P would know to deliver some content through its traditional solution and the remaining via its peer-assisted algorithms. He called the peer-assisted network a “value-add” to a potential relationship with a sports partner.
So far, PhenixP2P has had nearly 300,000 concurrent streams “at less than 500 milliseconds of end-to-end latency” with one data center. According to Corenthal, there is “no limit” on the size of the audience that the startup could provide sports content for in the future.
“Several significant pilot projects are now underway across a variety of categories such as professional sports, broadcast news, eSports/video gaming, social media, and online education to name a few,” Kyle Bank, Director of Business Development at PhenixP2P, told Tech.Co following the company’s closing of a $3.5 million Series A round. “We are working diligently to become the go-to provider of real-time video content delivery.”
