SmartCast delivery chart · schematic, not a node inventory
One stream in.
Unlimited
viewers out.
Legend
- SmartCast Backbone. One copy, whatever the audience.
- Regional fan-out to endnodes.
- Last mile. One copy per viewer, unchanged.
1,0001,000,000
- Copies crossing the backbone
- Viewers
- Endnodes serving
at roughly 1,000 viewers per endnode at 5 Mbps
Viewcast delivers live video over Smart PTMP, point-to-multipoint delivery for the public internet. One copy of the programme crosses the long-distance network and fans out only where the audience is, so the delivery bill stops climbing with the audience.
The same stream as a one-line drawing
Scroll the drawing
Notes
- One copy of the programme crosses the long-distance network.
- It works over the ordinary internet, with no cooperation needed from telecoms companies.
- Roughly 1,000 viewers per endnode at 5 Mbps.
- The last stretch still happens exactly as before. Every viewer still receives their own copy of the picture.
Legend
- SmartCast Backbone. One copy, whatever the audience.
- Regional fan-out to endnodes.
- Last mile. One copy per viewer, unchanged.
Schematic. Node positions illustrate the hierarchy; they are not an inventory.
- Smart PTMP
- Point-to-multipoint delivery for the public internet: one copy of a live stream crosses the long-distance network and fans out near the viewer, with no cooperation needed from telecoms companies.
- SmartCast
- Viewcast’s delivery layer built on Smart PTMP: origin to global masters to regional masters to endnodes to viewers.
- SmartPlay
- Viewcast’s playout and console: upload, schedule and forget, with SRT and HLS out, advertising, protection, measurement and monitoring in one console.
- Endnode
- The local point near the audience where the single stream fans out to individual viewers; roughly 1,000 viewers per endnode at 5 Mbps.
- Last mile
- The stretch from the endnode to each screen. Every viewer still receives their own copy of the picture; nothing changes there.
- 8 Years in production since 2018
- 9 Channels, 24/7
- 140+ Countries per internal analytics
- 2,900+ Consecutive production days
- 99.97% Uptime per internal analytics
Ten thousand viewers, ten thousand copies of the same stream. We send one.
Scroll the drawing
Copies on the backbone
- Per-viewer delivery
- SmartCast
The internet was never built to send the same live programme to a lot of people at once. It was built to send one thing to one person. So when a broadcaster streams live today, the delivery network sends a separate, private copy to every single viewer: ten thousand viewers means ten thousand copies going out.
SmartCast sends one copy of the programme across the long-distance network. It arrives close to where the audience is, and only there does it fan out to individual viewers. Add another ten thousand viewers and the long-distance part carries no extra traffic at all. It works over the ordinary internet, with no cooperation needed from telecoms companies.
Being straight about one thing
The last stretch, from the local point to each individual screen, still happens exactly as before. Every viewer still receives their own copy of the picture. What changes is everything before that: the expensive, long-distance part.
The more successful the programme, the bigger the bill. That is the problem we remove.
Live streaming has a strange economics problem: the more successful your programme is, the more money it costs you. A hit show is a bigger bill. Broadcasters are now at the point where the delivery bill is eating the margin on the very shows that are working.
Customers typically save 30% or more on what they currently pay their delivery network, and the saving grows as the audience grows. We price against what the equivalent unicast delivery would cost you, so the bigger your peaks, the wider the gap.
Schematic. Not a quotation; your saving depends on your peaks.
One platform, not five vendors.
Playout, server-side ad insertion, DRM, analytics and the delivery layer itself: one integrated stack, one contract, one console.
SmartPlay · Playout
Upload, schedule and forget. Broadcast-grade playout with SRT and HLS out, or hand the output straight into SmartCast delivery. One signal to every platform: SmartCast for all online/IPTV/FAST platforms at scale, and secure, dedicated SRT, RTMP or MPEG-TS/HLS feeds for broadcasters’ existing back of house chains, chosen per channel.
Advertising
Server-side ad insertion against VAST 3.0 and 4.0, stitched into the stream rather than bolted onto the player, so it survives ad blockers and behaves the same on every device. Revenue share rather than a per-impression fee.
Protection
Widevine DRM with bring-your-own-key for video on demand. We do not claim multi-DRM as shipped.
SmartCast · Delivery
Origin to global masters to regional masters to endnodes to viewers. One stream crosses the long-distance network however large the audience gets. Because the endnode already carries the stream, tuning in is not a cold fetch from a distant edge: channel switching is immediate, with no buffering on start.
Measurement without cookies
Every endnode reports join and leave events over a TLS backchannel, so viewer counts, session durations and geography come from the infrastructure itself, not from browser cookies, tracking pixels or third-party scripts.
Monitoring
A 24/7 network operations centre with a live dashboard: every stream, every endnode, every viewer, with per-channel viewer series and a geographic heatmap.
You can also take just the delivery layer: we plug in as a transparent carve-out behind your existing playout and DRM, typically live in four to six weeks. If it does not perform, you flip the traffic back. That is the entire risk of trying it.
- Runs on
- C and C++ encoders; HLS, SRT and MPEG-TS output; a multi-region edge mesh. Cloud-agnostic: AWS, Azure, GCP or bare metal. It is the delivery leg that changes, not your stack.
Every viewer counted, and not a cookie asked.
Web analytics count the viewers who let themselves be counted. A consent banner, an ad blocker or a browser that refuses third-party scripts takes a share of your audience out of the figures before anyone sees them. We count in a different place: in the delivery path.
Every viewer arrives through an endnode, and that endnode reports the join and the leave over a TLS backchannel. It is not a sample and not a model. It is the session itself, so the number is the whole audience rather than the part that agreed to be measured. There is no cookie to set, no pixel to load and no third-party script to block.
That is also why the figure survives the things that break browser analytics. A viewer on a television, on a set-top box or in an app that has no cookie store at all is counted exactly like a viewer in a browser, because the counting never depended on the browser.
What that gives you
- Concurrent viewers per channel, live, and the same figure after the fact.
- Where the audience is, from the endnode that served it.
- One record, continuous since 2019, opened for diligence on request.
- We describe it as a measurement architecture and nothing more: IP addresses are personal data, and what that means for your consent obligations is a question for your counsel, not for us.
Secure on the way out, and on the way in.
A feed to a broadcaster's back of house travels over SRT with its own passphrase and its own port for each destination, so one partner's link is not another's. Video on demand is protected with Widevine using keys you generate and own, imported over standard CPIX, with AES-128 on the chain where full DRM is not required. Inside the console every tenant is separated, and what a tenant may do is granted per tenant rather than assumed.
Less to protect
- No cookie store means no cookie store to leak.
- No third-party script in your page means nothing of ours to compromise in your player.
- Telemetry leaves the endnode over TLS and goes nowhere else.
Carrying live production traffic since 2018.
DanceTV, an independent company and a customer of eight years, runs nine channels around the clock to more than 140 countries on SmartCast. FlixSnip, a European FAST operator, runs on SmartPlay under a signed contract.
- Years in productionsince 2018
- 8
- Channels, 24/7
- 9
- Countriesper internal analytics
- 140+
- Consecutive production days
- 2,900+
- Uptimeper internal analytics
- 99.97%
Chart notes
2024 – present · Comcast / Xfinity. Comcast / Xfinity: signed vendor contract; active integration engagement, 2024 to present.
Viewcast, Inc. · Nevada. Viewcast, Inc. is a Nevada corporation. The team is the inventor of the protocol, the engineer who built the encoder that is in production today, and the people who took it from three channels to nine. We did not learn streaming to start this company; the solution came first.
Bring two numbers.
Your current delivery bill and your peak concurrency. Those two numbers are enough for us to tell you whether the saving is worth your time, and to tell you if it is not.
The fastest useful conversation is a walkthrough of the live production environment: nine channels running, the monitoring open, and your own numbers held against it. That answers most technical and most commercial questions in one session.