The Community Expert Spotlight will highlight forum members whose significant contributions designate leadership and advanced streaming experience.
Karel Boek-Raskenlund 
Tell us about a streaming workflow your company specializes in?
As there are a lot of different businesses out there, and no two companies are the same, we have experience with a lot of different workflows. We’ve worked, and work on projects for large organizations (like NBC Universal, FlowPlayer, Robi Axiata, Digita) and government agencies, but also for small companies and start-ups. Several Broadcasters and Telcos for instance, are taking OTT in their own hand and building platforms capable of streaming to a wide variety of different devices.
Another use case is Live-commerce - and more generally workflows with user-generated content, where scaling and interactivity along the streaming experience is a defining success factor. And of course, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s a lot of interest for virtual and “hybrid” solutions for conferences, congresses, or smaller events like weddings.
How long have you been in the video streaming industry?
My early memories of doing research on Streaming Media solutions are from the late 90’s. Back then it was lots of Windows Media Server, some RealVideo and some Quicktime. Streaming solutions have become considerably more complex since then. Technology moves fast, and it’s important to be aware of today’s and tomorrow’s opportunities.
What is the most important reason you use Wowza?
Nowadays there are many different mediaservers and -services in the market, and as an independent Consultancy company, we always pick the best product for the job. One of the reasons we choose Wowza for several projects is that their Products are easy to integrate and fit into larger workflows because of the APIs and open communication options.
Also, they’re well documented, and they provide good support. Particularly 2nd or 3rd line support is very important for us.
What are your predictions for streaming trends in 2021?
Now that the world starts to realize that COVID-19 isn’t going away anytime soon, event organizers will plan most, if not all of their conferences, and other events to be online, or at least hybrid. That will propel the shift in the event business which - in my opinion - has just begun. New flavors of social streaming will be invented and discovered; I think particularly live-commerce will become quite popular.
If we look at Streaming as a technology, besides the obvious things like low-latency (LL-HLS, HESP), codecs (AV1), and 5G, we’ll see a lot more SRT and RIST and a lot less RTSP and RTMP. Last but not least there’s a big chance that streaming will more and more find its way to the IoT market, and propel automation across all industries.
Is your company or product focused primarily on video streaming?
We’re a technology company, but for every project our starting point is the Business Case and the User Story. We help organizations and businesses that either have Streaming Media as their main product or as a supporting service. Since we own the expertise about the “how”, we’re interested to learn about the “why”. From there, we build solutions that keep amazing our customers and even ourselves.
If you’d like help with your streaming workflow, all of our 3rd party consultants can be contacted in our Hire a Consultant forum.
Consultants are video-streaming experts, but not affiliated with Wowza Media Systems.