A Decade of Streaming: Celebrating StreamShark’s 10-Year Anniversary 🦈
This year marks StreamShark’s 10th anniversary! To celebrate, I wanted to take a trip down memory lane and explore StreamShark’s evolution.
Let’s set the scene, it’s 2015. The dress debate is still raging (blue/black or white/gold), the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji (😂) was crowned Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, and Mad Max: Fury Road offered a glimpse into Australia’s true living conditions.
In Melbourne, Australia — one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth — an idea was born: how could we make live streaming scalable, reliable, and secure for everyone, from tech pioneers to global enterprises? From this idea, StreamShark emerged.
You might know that before StreamShark, there was MetaCDN. MetaCDN started as a multi-CDN provider with basic video streaming features. However, we decided to pivot the company to focus exclusively on video.
From that point onwards, our focus on video has led us to work on amazing projects, with amazing people. I’ve put together a brief timeline highlighting StreamShark’s journey over the past decade.
2015 – 2017: Building the Core and Stepping Onto the Global Stage
- Pioneering Formats: We quickly adopted next-generation video, becoming a recognized Facebook Live Partner and delivering early support for complex formats like 360-degree video streaming for major events and innovators.
- A complete platform rebuild: in order to support cloud based transcoding, it required us to completely rethink how we were previously hosting live streams. This led to us rebuilding our live encoding workflow from the ground up.
- Essential Analytics: We created our own analytics tools, which allows users to see viewer data in real-time.
- Our first encoder integration: We worked with the amazing folks at vMix to integrate StreamShark into their software.
- Industry Standards: We joined the SRT Alliance in 2017, which started our journey in supporting the SRT protocol.
- Trade Show Debut: We began establishing our physical presence in the industry, making our first appearance at major events like Streaming Media West in 2016.
2018 – 2019: Securing and Scaling for the Enterprise
- Corporate Security: We delivered robust solutions to protect sensitive internal streams, including advanced controls for streams secured with Single Sign-On (SSO).
- P2P Streaming: To handle massive internal audiences without crushing corporate networks, we implemented deep integrations with P2P and eCDN technology partner Hive Streaming.
- Encoder Management: We streamlined professional production workflows through integration with video encoders like AWS Elemental Live and Epiphan Pearl.
- Global Presence: We significantly expanded our trade show presence, showcasing our solutions at NAB Show 2018 and IBC 2018 for the first time, signaling our growth into a global enterprise solution provider.
- Video Meet Up: We hosted our first video meet up, Mel<Video>.
2020 – 2021: Compliance and Accessibility in a Virtual World
- ISO Certified: A landmark moment occurred in August 2021 when we achieved ISO 27001 certification, a global validation of our dedication to maintaining the highest standards for information security and privacy (a standard we proudly re-certified in 2024).
- Live Scheduler: We launched our VOD 2 Live feature, which allows customers to simulate live streams with pre-recorded content.
- Virtual Event Scaling: We enabled organizations to easily extend and secure their Zoom Meetings and other virtual gatherings for a broader, professional audience.
- Automatic VOD Captioning: We implemented automatic VOD captioning, that removed the need for customers to manually write captions.
2022 – 2025: Intelligent Workflows and Next-Level Engagement
- Health and Logging: was launched to allow customers a way to check the health/quality of their source stream.
- Live Stream Accessibility: With the continued advancements of AI, we partnered with SyncWords and AI-Media who now allow us to provide live captions, translations and voice dubbing, unlocking access to global and diverse audiences.
- Automatic VOD Metadata Generation: With the launch of Shark AI: Scribe, it allows customers to automatically generate captions, title, description, chapter markers and tags for all their VOD content. This has been a big time saver for our customers.
- Audience Interaction: To transform passive viewing into active participation, we rolled out powerful engagement tools:
- Live Reactions
- Live Call-to-Actions
- Live Polling
- Continued Trade Show Presence: We continued to launch major platform features and partnerships at key industry events, including new solutions for hardware encoder management and VR/Immersive Video intelligence at NAB Show and IBC through 2025.
Thank You for 10 Incredible Years
We extend our heartfelt gratitude to our customers, business partners, and friends. Your support has been instrumental in our journey.
Streaming is a vast concept, yet the community behind the scenes is relatively small. It has been a pleasure over the years to meet so many wonderful people who share the same enthusiasm for the streaming industry!
Here’s to 10 more years of StreamShark!
