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From Gaming to Streaming: How i3DNet's Hybrid Infrastructure Breaks Vendor Lock-in
As the second most peered network globally with over 65 points of presence worldwide, i3DNet has built something remarkable - an infrastructure designed to satisfy gaming's most demanding users that now powers millions of concurrent streams on platforms like Discord. "Gamers are the most demanding users in the internet world," Stefan explains, highlighting how meeting their expectations has created a network optimized for performance.
Stefan Idler from i3DNet joins us to discuss how their gaming-focused infrastructure is revolutionizing video streaming with a hybrid cloud approach that breaks vendor lock-in while significantly reducing costs.
• i3DNet operates the second most peered network globally with 65+ points of presence
• Originally built for demanding gamers, their infrastructure now powers millions of Discord video streams concurrently
• Traditional cloud providers create vendor lock-in that limits flexibility and becomes costly at scale
• Their hybrid cloud model combines flexible compute with premium networking at 10x lower cost than cloud providers
• Case study: Real-time video platform saved significantly by routing heavy traffic through i3DNet while keeping ML workloads in GCP
• Support philosophy focuses on human interaction with 24/7 live ops team and one-step resolution
• Future trends include traffic growth, expanded global presence, data sovereignty concerns, and AI integration
• Converged infrastructure is emerging where network becomes both computing platform and distribution mechanism
Visit i3dnet.net to learn more about their solutions or connect with Stefan directly on LinkedIn to discuss your specific infrastructure needs.
Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.
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Mark Donnigan:The voices of video. Voices of video. Well, it is time for another voices of video interview and I'm so excited to have back stefan idler from i3dnet. Stefan, thank you for joining us. It's great to be back, mark, thank you yeah, yeah. So, uh, you know it's been, I guess I guess about six or eight weeks since we recorded our last interview and you know a lot has happened. Uh, we were at nab had a phenomenal show. How was the show for you guys?
Stefan Ideler:It's Vegas, so we definitely enjoyed it.
Mark Donnigan:That's right. That's right, but what about the business?
Stefan Ideler:As I said, we were not very much known into this specific market right, so we always originate from the gaming ecosystem. So we used to show to share knowledge, try out pitches, obviously. What resonates? Do the arguments from the gaming industry resonate at NAB or do we need to adjust the pitches a little bit? We did get a lot of information about the ecosystem and in a way it's about the ecosystem is not that much different from gaming. You have a few large players who dominate the industry and in both of the industries we are trying to break the status quo right, that's right To offer advantages to clients.
Mark Donnigan:Well, you have a different approach which we're going to get into. But for those listeners who may not actually be familiar, maybe they didn't hear our first interview and they're saying i3D, who is this company? What do you do? Why don't you give the elevator pitch? You know the elevator presentation of you, know who you are and what you're doing in media and entertainment.
Stefan Ideler:Yeah, presentation of you know who you are and what you're doing in media and entertainment.
Stefan Ideler:Yeah, so ifcd we were founded more than 20 years ago and we see ourselves as the the scaling experts.
Stefan Ideler:So we scale complex solutions with compute network anything infrastructure related on a global scale and we try to support you and your business the best possible way, 24-7 with it, by taking your worries away and making sure it's fixed before it even reaches you. So we do this by A making sure we're everywhere globally, at all the big metros, so we can serve our users in the most quick, efficient way possible, and especially also having the network connecting all of these sites together so we can gain tremendous insights, cost advantages and performance advantages compared to the other solutions out there. Combine those things together and you have an ideal solution which works really well for us in the games industry, where we work with all the major game publishers and game companies out there, and also in the video voice streaming industry, where players such as a discord users for all of the services worldwide yeah, um, you know, your roots in gaming is, uh, I think, definitely unique and uh also sets you apart, because I can't think of a more demanding user than a gamer you're totally correct.
Stefan Ideler:Gamers are the most demanding users in I I would say the internet world, in the internet world. That's right. Even their choice of ISP depends on how well is this connected to the games that I play, that I enjoy to consume. They are extremely critical to get the pitchforks out on Twitter or X and other social platforms.
Stefan Ideler:And from a game company perspective, it's so crucial to inform the gamers as quickly and as accurately as possible in what is going on, and that's why you need to work with partners who can help you on that front.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, that's right. That's right Now. You already mentioned Discord and I don't think that everyone inside the video community actually realizes how big Discord's video platform is. Are you able to share even some kind of rough ballpark numbers of how many concurrent users and how many streams are being supported, Because I know I was a little surprised when I learned so it's mind-boggling.
Stefan Ideler:I know most people's social life nowadays, especially the younger generation, especially since COVID is on Discord. So we're talking about millions and millions of concurrent streams, concurrents With users, people watching movies together on stream, doing daily chores together on stream, doing daily chores together on stream, playing games together on stream. Even when I go home from work, I join discord on a call and talk to my users. So the the scale is as big as some of the other largest known uh streaming solutions out there. And because the majority of Discord users at least originated from gaming, these people are also extremely critical on the performance.
Mark Donnigan:Yes, Getting back to, they'll bring out the pitchforks if something stops working or the quality is not up to their expectation. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. Well, I wanted to highlight that because you know you said hey, we've been around 20 years. You know we're, you know we're kind of big, we have a lot of points of presence. But again, I think you should actually throw out some numbers Like how big is your, your, your pop's? My understanding, if you're not the largest, you're like maybe the second largest in the world, so maybe you can let us know it's more than 65 points of presence.
Stefan Ideler:So where we have machines, the network equipment and so on, um, if you look at the network itself, it's right now. When I last checked today it's the second most appeared network in the world.
Stefan Ideler:So that means we have the highest number of interconnections with other networks directly, to also ensure that we have a direct point of contact, that we always know where the traffic goes and we cut out the middleman as much as possible, because if there's a middleman between our servers and the end user, it's also a black hole of information that you cannot easily access and it delays the whole process to get information and ensure the quality in terms of capacity. Well, let's just say, in gaming we've also learned that gamers are very fanatical and like to attack things if they disagree. So we had to build out a lot of external capacity, ranging in the nearly hundreds of terabits, a second of capacity to soak these kind of attacks, which means that, yeah, it helps to be able to to to deal with these kind of situations yeah, so, uh, you know.
Mark Donnigan:I think the point here, the main takeaway, is when you talk about scale. This is not just a marketing use of the word. You know scale is always thrown out. Oh, you know, we built our system for scale. It's like go to everyone's website. It says you know, scalable video or scalable? You know, fill in the blank. You know, scalable video or scalable? You know, fill in the blank.
Mark Donnigan:But you've really done it. You know there's real hardware sitting in real data centers all across the world. You have peering arrangements and peering agreements in place the second most peering agreements, according to what you just said of you know, of of anyone else. So I think this is a really interesting foundation you know to expand into, shall I say, more traditional video streaming. Um, you know from your core business, which is gaming. So you know why don't you explain what your offer is? Because it's also, in my mind, a little bit different and different in a good way. But I think the industry needs to really understand what you guys are bringing, because you're actually more than just a CDN, correct? You're more than just a cloud. You're a CDN plus a cloud, but you're different. So explain this.
Stefan Ideler:Yeah, sometimes we say we're built different. Sorry, I had to use that one. So you're correct. Okay, if you look at compared to the current ecosystem, right, you're with one of the two dominant players or one big cloud provider. You're pretty much locked in. You enjoy a lot of convenience and flexibility, but you're also a little bit stuck and also at the mercy of the provider you're with in case they want to give you more discounts next year or not. So how do we compare to that? Just like with the cloud, you can also have flexible compute with us. You provision it through Terraform at the locations that you need it, which is okay. So far, so good.
Stefan Ideler:And then the networking parts is where it becomes a little bit different. The networking that we have is, by default, built for the premium use case, so to make sure that the traffic is as close to the user as possible and it travels as directly as possible. As far as we can carry the bits and bytes by cloud. By default, you don't really have that behavior. When they receive the bits and bytes from your server, they just want to throw it out over the fence to the next party as soon as possible, so they don't have to pay the price to transport your bits and bytes all the way across the world.
Stefan Ideler:Now, cloud also has a product which does do that, for example, a global acceleration or Google premium networking. But if you compare us our offering to that offering you see like a 10x difference in terms of request pricing. So that's a big incentive to look into. Maybe you're right now with a single provider. You're a bit overcommit. Maybe you're right now with a single provider you're a bit over-commit. There's a big incentive to then start looking into maybe using us as a hybrid model, starting a little bit with the commit that you spent anyway, and then see if it performs as good as we claim it is and see if we can make a difference both in performance but also, of course, on the costs that you pay per user to serve them.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, that's right. I think it's really interesting. Terms like the hybrid cloud or multi-CDN and all the variations of those two phrases or terms have been used for years. Some people have actually gone out and developed and done the work you know, to deploy multiple CD maybe cost reduction, maybe performance advantage or sometimes even both. But for every case study that shows it's a success, there's probably an equal number or more who will say, well, we tried it, but we ran into, you know, any number of difficulties. But it's interesting what I'm seeing.
Mark Donnigan:I'm seeing that, on one hand, yes, the market needs, needs and wants convenience. You know they want package solutions and that's why, again, if you know, at NAB you walk around the show floor and everything is marketed as a solution, as a platform. Certainly, I think buyers are, you know, on a surface level, they're drawn to that because it's easy, right? Oh, wow, I can get everything from one vendor. Or I can get, you know, rather than having to piece together multiple solutions, you know I can get it all from this vendor and then I can go to another vendor to get the other major components. And you know it quote simplifies my life. But people are also realizing exactly what you just said, you know, a minute ago, is that now I've got vendor lock-in, now I'm stuck with that solution.
Mark Donnigan:Right Now, what do I do if my requirements don't align with the roadmap of this solution provider? Maybe I want to integrate a Kodak and they say, ah, that's not really on our roadmap because we don't have sufficient demand for it. You know, maybe there's a new technology, there's a lot of things, and again there's competition, right, just because I'm a big service and I want to do something doesn't mean that my competitor wants to do the same, you know, and if we both happen to be running on the same platform, then guess what? Maybe I lose and I don't get what I need. And guess what? Maybe I lose and I don't get what I need.
Mark Donnigan:So we at NetIn are seeing this very, very, very, very plainly, and one of the things that we're excited about in working with I3D is that we're going to be able to bring this idea of this. You know, flexible infrastructure, you know this, this bare but but more than just the boxes in a data center, you know, boxes is somebody can actually go off and now deploy what they need when they need it, you know. And so I'm curious, you know, if you have any, any you know references or case studies or user stories, even from the gaming world. Maybe you know where, where you're doing that, where you're building a somewhat bespoke platform that exactly meets the needs of that. You know that particular service or platform. Can you share with the audience how you've done that and where that's been successful? That approach, sure.
Stefan Ideler:I also was thinking about what you said earlier about the ecosystem and convenience. Right, we also realized that instead of being a client that maybe the big cloud or the big provider directly, we see also when we talked at the show floor that many customers are clients of these service providers directly and they kind of then, depending on who they integrated with, then depends on where the infrastructure will actually go. So first, it was also very interesting discovery that we learned that one of the ways to keep the convenience for the customer is that if we also integrate with those service providers as an option, right, so you can still retain your convenience but still also benefit from the cost differences. And, of course, the service provider will take a cut, as it always goes in business, which is why companies exist, but it's still a big benefit. As for your other question, yes, we've also had a very nice use case with NetInt as well, with a client who is in.
Stefan Ideler:The. Real-time videos is a real-time video streaming platform known for high quality, low latency live content with a lot of user interaction taking place as well. I cannot mention the company name, obviously, but I can displace some of the infrastructure components that they did. On one hand, they work with GCP, with Kubernetes, storage and machine learning workloads, with GCP, with Kubernetes, storage and machine learning workloads, and at ICDNET they use that compute, that flexible compute, for ingestion these workloads, processing these using the NetInt chipsets to encode and then deliver these video streams via MTP and WebRTC to the users. And it's a containerized architecture which spans of both providers and to the outside world it appears as a single, unified cluster. So that's truly that hybrid model that that that we talk about, um. So they went from limitations that they had was being stuck with pretty high egress costs, um, which also limited the amount of R&D budget. They had to innovate. Yeah, a lock-in into that managed provider's environment.
Stefan Ideler:There was a, as always with any startup, your biggest constraint is the resources of your own team and finding great people to join your team. Right, that's right. Getting more resources available is always a good, good thing. And there was a lack of affordable, high performance storage outside of the cloud. So we solved that by providing these, these flexible, bare metal machines, high performance, low cost for those RTC workloads and streaming sessions, together with the NetEnt appliances. And then we enabled the hybrid architecture between the cloud provider and us, but all the heavy video traffic was routed through the ISDU net locations to ensure the client could benefit from these significant cost advantages locations to ensure the client could benefit from these significant cost advantages. So both the GPUs and the VPUs that we offered for the real-time transcoding and scaling proved to be a massive, massive decision-maker and plus side to the whole solution. And also the cost calculations between going from single provider to multi-provider hybrid cloud and then calculations between going from single provider to multi-provider hybrid cloud.
Stefan Ideler:Um, and then there's some soft things around it, like being able to support the client. You don't have to talk to a ticket system. You talk to real people on a stack channel I'm even I'm in there as well, for they just tag me if, if, if, if something is wrong and we'll look at it. Sure, I cannot clone myself indefinitely, but we we try to support clients with our live ops team 24 7 the same way as how we would ourselves like to be supported, and that's that's something that we always keep thinking about. And when you talk to someone in a support call, that person should be able to fix like at least% of all the cases that they handle. So it's a one-step resolution.
Stefan Ideler:So ultimately, summarized on that, on the one hand, massive savings always good. There's more operational stability because of the flexible infrastructure, right, you're no longer constrained to if it's going to be a success. No, I can scale up when I need to and I scale it down when I need to as well, where, like 10 years ago with a traditional data center, that was not possible. You were always talking into month or many, and latency optimizations for the user, which is particularly important because of the interactivity required of the application. Now, I totally understand that's not a factor in all streaming solutions. You have buffers to take on, a lot of leeway for your network performance, but still it's nice that it's relatively in sync, right, because you don't want to be the person who notices 10 seconds later that the goal is scored and your neighbors are already cheering.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, that's right.
Stefan Ideler:It needs to be within reason or on par. And another big plus was that, yes, you can get net-ins at other cloud providers, but they really liked that we had this partnership together to be able to move quickly when needed. Yeah, yeah.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, I like that case study because it highlights a couple things that are just major trends. And if you think about what a trend is, I mean a trend is really just the signposts that a market has decided to go in a certain direction. That could be adopting a set of technologies, it could be using specific standards, it could be the way specific standards it could be. You know the way, you know architectures, you know the way things are built. And this notion of moving from these bespoke, individual package services, which were very convenient and I think they were needed at a time, you know, you think, five or seven years ago, certainly 10 years ago the concept of, like an OVP, an online video platform. It wasn't just convenience, it was almost required because, you know, unless you were Apple or YouTube, you know, or Facebook, or you know, or Netflix or a handful of other video platforms Like there just weren't, there weren't the people, the engineers that you could hire, you know, to go build your workflow, so you had to go to these platforms. Well, now, as the market has evolved and grown and as talent has been built and engineers now have, you know, 10 years of experience building and more even, you know, building video streaming platforms build exactly what they need and to do a cost effectively, to save money in the process and all of the benefits that we've already talked about.
Mark Donnigan:You know leaving the vendor lock in, leaving the high markups, because you are very, very correct. You know the. The dirty little secret, if we want to put it that way, is that you know, to start, it is very affordable. The cloud is very affordable, right? You know, when you only have a small number of users and you're starting to scale, like wow, the cloud is cheap and it's true, it is relatively speaking. But what do you do when, all of a sudden, you've moved from several thousand users to 100,000 users? What do you do when you suddenly break a million users? What do you do when you're suddenly at 10 million users and that scale continues and all of a sudden, it's not affordable anymore?
Stefan Ideler:No. And then you start to think about how do we get discounts? You start talking about year-long commits and then ultimately you're stuck in the same position as you were 10 years ago with the data centers. What you mentioned is completely correct, because over the past decade also, the technologies have become more standardized. Right, we've seen the move towards containerization.
Stefan Ideler:It's very easy to move applications from one platform to another nowadays. Ten years ago it wasn't there. We saw the same in the gaming industry. Ten years ago it was completely logical and made sense to move from the traditional cumbersome data center propositions towards the ultimate flexibility in cloud. But now skip ahead a decade later and you see that the data center propositions towards the ultimate flexibility in cloud. But now skip ahead a decade later and you see that the data center propositions have also evolved to support and enable that hybrid business model. And it's not like you need to hire 50 new engineers again to manage the same Kubernetes bots that you're already managing on your cloud instances. So in that regard, life has become easier instances. So in that regards, life has become easier, uh.
Mark Donnigan:but um, I also very much understand that getting things to change also can take some time.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a challenge, you know, shifting mindsets and and shifting best practices, and you know, let's face it, you know one of the things too that, um, you know is very true, is it because we are now 20 years? You know the streaming video industry is more than 20 years old, as defined by, if you look back at the very, very first, you know, internet streaming broadcast. You know we're coming up on really like 30 years. You know roughly it was. You know nine, 96, 97,.
Mark Donnigan:You know certainly 98, uh, even though it was posted sized video, um, you know, 10 frames per second, 15 frames per second, so far from, uh, you know what we have today, but yet it was like mind blowing, right, I can remember, uh, you know what we have today, but yet it was like mind blowing, right, I can remember, you know, seeing some of those early. You know I'm dating myself, but seeing some of those early internet streaming. You know video streaming broadcasts, if you want to call it that, and it was just mind. You know, mind blowing, like I'm watching this on the internet. What else could I do on the internet?
Stefan Ideler:wow, you know same feeling and I think with no the generation of us. We've had the, the, the pleasure of seeing a whole evolution from now. Same with games. When I started in my youth, the games, the monitor had one color, it was green. Yeah, we have now and. And the same with uh. You, you can have your whole life literally on the internet your job, your work, your social uh, your content, uh. To consume content, yeah, it to consume content. It's mind-blowing when you think about it, but it's also actually really cool that we can do that.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, it is, it is. Yeah, yeah, it really is. Well, you know, stefan, we're very excited about the work that NetIn is doing with i3D and you know, maybe you can give you know where could listeners, viewers, go to get more information, learn more about the company, learn more about the value proposition, specifically in video, video streaming. Where would you send them?
Stefan Ideler:Well, obviously, I would send them to our main website, sdnetnet, and you can select on the different propositions there. And, of course, um. I would also love to get in touch with you personally. You can reach out to me or one of my teams on linkedin. Um, it's one of the special like being at a company for 20 years. You do many, many different things. Right in the beginning as a startup, you do everything and ultimately you find something. What you enjoy most, and for me, it's the talking with, with customers and potential customers. Figure out what the problem is and what can we do to make your life easier for yourself, for your developers, but also for your players or your users. So I always love digging into new cases. So, yeah, have my LinkedIn inbox open and feel free to reach out.
Mark Donnigan:I know you're active on LinkedIn and you know anymore. When people ask me like, well, how you know, how do people get in touch with you, it's I don't even bother with, like oh, here's my email address or whatever.
Stefan Ideler:It's like just find me on LinkedIn Email doesn't work, it's LinkedIn and Slack essentially.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah yeah, yeah, that's exactly, or Discord, right.
Stefan Ideler:Or Discord, yeah, for you, not for me.
Mark Donnigan:I'm not quite that progressive yet, but I need to be, but I need to be, I need to be, I will be. Well, in conclusion, I think everybody's interested. We're all focused on, hey, what our needs are today. Where do I have a problem? And do you have a solution for me? And I think we should? I think that's the right perspective. If we're always living in the future like, well, it's gonna be hard to get get something done. Um, but I, I think also people are very interested in how.
Mark Donnigan:How is the network evolving, you know, and so I would like to end our discussion with, uh, you know, with your thoughts. Give me your thoughts on where you see the network and I'll let you define network. However, you know, um, I think of it as more than just cdn. Um, you know and I don't want to say more because then I give away where I see it evolving, which I think is in alignment with where you see it evolving too. But how do you see the network evolving? You know in video, but you know also gaming, but just in general, how do you see it evolving? What's it going to look like? And let's not go too far out, but like in three years.
Stefan Ideler:You know what's the network going to look like Very good question, and I see it on multiple layers. So on the technical side of things, I believe the traffic is only going to grow and grow and grow. People are still consuming higher grade content on their TVs and mobile phones, even though they might not notice the difference between 4 and 8K. If the option is there, people will use it. Yeah, they usually want it. They usually want it. They usually want it. So the demand on the infrastructure is going to keep growing, right. So that's point one.
Stefan Ideler:I also think that we ourselves will also be driven to be even closer to more users and our users, which might currently be more remote for now still more users and our users, which might currently be more remote, for now, still like. When I look at our current presence, there's still some relatively dark spots in Africa and middle of America, where I think, for example, the west coast of Australia, where I think we also need the West Coast of Australia, where I think we also need to be to be able to really complete our offering. There's also a bit of a geopolitical factor going on, which is uncertainty in our business.
Mark Donnigan:And is that like data sovereignty, Data sovereignty?
Stefan Ideler:where does the data live? What guarantees can you give? What does happen with my user data? These are all kinds of potential, both opportunities and problems, depending on how you look at it, depending on how it goes. But the uncertainty itself is what kind of makes long-term predictions a bit difficult, which is also understandable why more and more companies faced with that uncertainty are looking at the bottom line. I think let's just go for safe, let's just go for costs and I totally understand that reasoning To have a little bit more buffer, for you never know what's going to happen.
Stefan Ideler:So, personally, I hope three years from now the world will be more stable so we don't have to worry about these kind of things. I think then we'll be mainly worrying how we can keep up with the growth and demand of all these applications. Also, with AI, we're going to see a lot of AI workloads which need to be as close to the compute and the users as possible, because users will be consuming content and playing games, for example, which will have these AI actors, ai teammates, in your game, and there needs to be as low latency as possible between the server processes and the AI. So I think that not just the bandwidth will increase, but also the power usage. There will be more heavier workloads in all the different POPs, even the smaller ones. So there's going to be a lot of infrastructural challenges and I also think, from NetIn's point of view, there will be also a lot more defense coding happening. Also, we see it already happening in the gaming niche, where some parts of the games are now being streamed.
Stefan Ideler:Yeah, that's right, it's not an official Cloud Stream game, but they stream in the new updates so people don't have to download it anymore, all to ensure the players are not disturbed, that the players retain the convenience to play, because if they wait at the download screen they're going to start up the other game and spend the money there. So yeah, yeah, there's a lot of future fun stuff coming yeah, so so you know.
Mark Donnigan:A question then would be do you up until recently and define recently? As you know I don't know a couple of years, I guess you know a couple compute and storage was its own separate thing and the cloud could be wherever it was. It could be infrastructure I'm running in my own data centers, it could be one of the big public clouds, it could be whatever. But they were siloed right, they were walled off. Cdn began at the origin. Cloud was its own separate thing. Cloud would do what it did encode the file, package it Once it dumped it to the origin. Then the CDN did its thing. But they were like two completely separate, distinct systems right Coming together and interlinked separate, distinct systems right coming together and intellectually together.
Mark Donnigan:So that, so, so, so that. So that's what I was curious. Uh is so, and and that's largely what you built by the virtue of you have bare metal that is sitting right on the cdn, you know, I mean, it's right there. So then it's kind of like well, wait a second, where does the c CDN start in the cloud end? Or let's even remove the word cloud, let's just say compute. Where does compute end and the cloud begin, and vice versa. So you see that really merging to where the network is now the computing platform and the distribution platform, it sounds like and the distribution platform.
Stefan Ideler:it sounds like Correct. I think the future is really that converged infrastructure, as we like to call it. You don't think of the components, as you mentioned earlier, in product silos anymore, because with the increased demands and the focus on your users, on the performance, on the costs, you need to break down these silos and combine all the advantages of the individual products and make them together as one.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, yeah, fabulous. Well, we see things moving very much in the same direction. I think it's just opening up. It's going to open up tremendous opportunities to do. I'm really excited. Like you said earlier in our conversation, it's like this exciting stuff, it's exciting times, and I really feel the same way. You know the ability now to to provide interactive experiences and to deliver quality that we only dreamed of, you know, even just five or six years ago, you know, which isn't that long ago actually.
Mark Donnigan:You know is is is coming and it's coming fast and with generative AI. And you know is is is coming and it's coming fast and with generative ai. And you know you mentioned, like these game engines. You know what they're going to be able to do for producing. You know ai, you know avatars and all kinds of experiences that are just going to be just incredible. And I see a blending even. You know. You know this is a little, I think, a little bit further out, but I see a blending where even the whole notion of like watching a movie that has been completed and the storylines written, and like we're going to be making our own movies on the fly, you know, in these engines and in these experiences, you know, yeah, it still will be actors that we're directing and, you know, maybe in time we'll be able to put ourselves in the movie. But you know just that ability to to create these interactive experiences. How cool, how fun.
Stefan Ideler:You know how transformative At the beginning of this. This transformation, yeah, like we, we've all seen that now with what's possible with AI and movie generation, and you go to YouTube and see some of these, these, these movies, still shorts with, yeah, but how quick that is. Well, quick evolution is on that level of technology.
Stefan Ideler:I just mentioned. Probably in a few years from now we'll just send up like a 10-minute selfie of each other video and send it to the platform. You type in prompt in the movie that you want to be in and you'll be there.
Mark Donnigan:It's like a Star Trek experience.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, yeah, yeah, very, very cool. Well, stefan, thank you for joining Again. This episode of Voices of Video is great having you back. We're very excited. We are going to be hosting you guys again, that is, i3d in the IBC booth, the NetEnt IBC booth, and we're very excited about that and I know we're going to be even upping. You know what we do together. There's going to be, you know, some more presentations, and so you know that's actually not so far out. I mean, before you know it, summer will be gone, september will be here, ibc is here, so, um, so, for those who attend IBC, you definitely will want to make sure you come by the NetAmp booth so that you can talk to i3d, uh, and you know really experience and see firsthand. Um, you know the power of the platform. You know the power of the platform. Yeah, awesome, well, good, well, as we like to wrap up, voices of Video, happy encoding. Yeah, happy encoding.
Stefan Ideler:And happy streaming and happy delivery of all types. Happy gaming, yeah that's right.
Mark Donnigan:Happy gaming. Yeah, all right, in all seriousness, thank you for listening and supporting and watching Voices of Video. This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NetInt Technologies. If you are looking for cutting-edge video encoding solutions check out NetInt's products at netintcom.
