“WebRTS is rewriting the rules of live streaming and the industry just took notice.”
Danny Burns
From Niche to Norm
Ceeblue has won the 2025 Streaming Media European Innovation Award for Content Delivery & Distribution.
In a field dominated by the biggest names in streaming infrastructure, this recognition stands out. Not just because Ceeblue is a smaller, highly specialized company, but because the award represents something much larger than a single product milestone.
It signals a significant and long-overdue shift in the streaming space.
For years, Ceeblue has been known as a “real-time specialist,” a niche within a niche of the already fragmented streaming industry. We built our reputation on sub-second latency delivery, with use cases in sportsbooks, iGaming, live shopping, and corporate communications. But this award, in the broader category of Content Delivery and Distribution, marks a turning point: real-time streaming is no longer a niche capability. It’s becoming the mainstream expectation.
Why This Award Matters
The Streaming Media European Innovation Awards are determined by thousands of votes from industry professionals, with more than 8,000 across 13 categories this year. The winners are selected by peers: engineers, broadcasters, OTT operators, and vendors who use, build, and integrate streaming technology daily.
When those professionals voted Ceeblue’s Media Fabric, and, by extension, the WebRTS framework, best in Content Delivery & Distribution, it wasn’t just a nod to performance. It was an acknowledgment that the future of live streaming isn’t about squeezing latency out of legacy workflows. It’s about rethinking how live video is distributed, scaled, and experienced in real time.
For the better part of a decade, Ceeblue has successfully maintained a real-time CDN with global coverage, delivering sub-second video across continents for iGaming, live events, and enterprise communication; but in all that time we’ve never won in this particular category. Not until something changed. In 2024 we released WebRTS, a framework that makes those same real-time latencies possible on any CDN, not just our own. That’s the breakthrough this award recognizes: the moment when real-time stopped being a closed ecosystem and became an open, accessible, infrastructure-agnostic standard.
In a few years, we’ll look back at 30–60-second “live” delays as something quaint, like dial-up modems or pixelated webcams.
The WebRTS Breakthrough
WebRTS was designed to do something that no existing protocol could quite manage: to deliver sub-second live video at global scale, over standard CDN infrastructure, without breaking existing workflows or forcing operators to choose between quality, compatibility, and latency.
Where earlier low-latency protocols like Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming (LL-HLS) promised low latency and compatibility but introduced complexity and cost, WebRTS took a different path.
Ceeblue prioritized efficiency, simplicity, and compatibility; efficient use of resources and bandwidth, simple integration and deployment, and compatibility with existing delivery infrastructure, players, and DRM providers.
A Bridge Between Eras
In practical terms, WebRTS bridges the gap between the old world dominated by HLS/DASH and the new reality of instant, sub-second broadcast. It isn’t a proprietary detour but an evolution that lets you keep your existing workflow while finally reaching the latencies viewers have been demanding for years.
For broadcasters, that means:
- No trading in your CDN for specialty delivery infrastructure.
- No complex CDN configurations or uncacheable playlist requests eating into your origin capacity.
- No new proprietary players to integrate.
For platform operators and event producers, it means:
- You can serve millions of viewers from a handful of origins.
- Your total delivery cost drops, often dramatically.
- You deliver real-time with high QoE, that’s compatible with network firewalls and eCDNs, without adding complexity.
The End of LL-HLS as a “Bridge”
If there’s one thing the industry has learned in the last five years, it’s that LL-HLS isn’t the stepping stone it was hoped to be. It promised to close the latency gap between HLS and real-time, but in practice, it became a costly detour.
It’s complex to implement, bandwidth-hungry, and notoriously unforgiving under heavy load. The uncacheable playlist churn alone can cripple origin performance when millions of viewers tune in.
With WebRTS, that problem disappears.
Because it’s cache-friendly and designed for large-scale distribution, you can deliver live sports or concerts to millions of concurrent users without adding infrastructure or stressing your CDN.
As Danny Burns, Ceeblue’s founder and CTO, explains:
“We see it every day: broadcasters spending millions to shave off seconds by using LL-HLS, only to hit a wall at 3 or 4 seconds latency. And then they see the bill at the end of the month. WebRTS is cheaper, less complex, more efficient, and faster.”
“For years, we’ve heard the same question from customers: ‘Can you just give me HLS, but faster?’ WebRTS … brings sub-second latency to the workflows people already trust and have invested in. … WebRTS is just what the industry has been waiting for.”
lawton cheney
A Standard for the Mainstream, Not a Specialty Tool
One of the reasons WebRTS has gained traction so quickly is its non-disruptive integration model. It’s not a “rip and replace” proposition, but can fit directly into existing architectures.
- It runs over standard CDNs, including Akamai, Orange CDN, and any Varnish-based CDN.
- It works seamlessly with existing DRM providers ( supporting Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay).
- It supports Smart TVs, Android set-top boxes, and there’s an SDK for HTML5 players.
That means no vendor lock-in. No black boxes. No hidden gateways.
Lawton Cheney, Ceeblue’s Chief Commercial Officer, puts it this way:
“For years, we’ve heard the same question from customers: ‘Can you just give me HLS, but faster?’ WebRTS is the closest that anyone’s going to get. It brings sub-second latency to the workflows people already trust and have invested in. This award shows that WebRTS is just what the industry has been waiting for.”
From Real-Time Niche to Broadcast Core
For years, real-time streaming was seen as the domain of betting platforms, auctions, and interactive conferencing. Sub-second video was something you used if you had to, not something you aimed for by design.
But that mindset is changing fast.
At IBC 2025 we spoke with 6 European broadcasters and 1 Asian broadcaster that all had internal objectives related to reducing the latency of their live sports broadcasts. This is the first time in the four years that we’ve exhibited at IBC that low latency has been anything but a “nice-to-have” for major broadcasters.
With WebRTS, the cost and complexity barriers that once made real-time impractical are gone. Broadcasters no longer have to choose between scalability and speed, or between DRM compatibility and latency. They can have all of it over the same CDN infrastructure they already use, right now.
That’s why Ceeblue’s win in the Content Delivery & Distribution category is so significant. It shows that real-time streaming isn’t just an alternative, it’s becoming the baseline.
The Industry Is Catching Up
Several major CDNs have already optimized for WebRTS.
- Akamai, the world’s largest commercial CDN, has integrated WebRTS delivery optimization across its global PoP network, ensuring sub-second live delivery at broadcast scale.
- Orange CDN has made WebRTS a core component of its European and MENA streaming infrastructure, allowing on-net sub-second delivery across telco-grade capacity.
- Varnish-based CDNs can natively support WebRTS out of the box, giving operators a zero-friction way to go real-time.
The “niche” real-time technology now rides on some of the largest and most established networks in existence.
Why Live Events Are Leading the Way
Live events, including sports, concerts, and interactive shows, are the perfect environment to showcase what WebRTS can do.
In these contexts, latency isn’t just a metric; it’s part of the experience. With traditional delivery methods, viewers see social media reactions, betting odds, and even audience chatter before their own stream catches up. For years, that disconnect has undermined the immediacy of “live.”
WebRTS solves that. It delivers broadcast-quality video, sub-second latency, and synchronized playback across millions of viewers—all while lowering operational cost.
The Economics of Real-Time
One of the least discussed aspects of the transition to real-time is its impact on cost structure. Traditional LL-HLS workflows almost always involve higher delivery spends, across development costs, infra, and delivery.
WebRTS’s real-time design eliminates the inefficiencies of LL-HLS, allowing broadcasters to reduce infrastructure demand by an order of magnitude compared to LL-HLS, reduce data traffic, and shorten time-to-market.
That’s why this award isn’t just about performance—it’s about economics.
Sub-second streaming is now consistently and significantly cheaper than LL-HLS. That flips the industry’s long-standing assumption on its head.
Open Source, Open Future
Ceeblue’s decision to open-source the WebRTS client at IBC 2025 reflects a broader philosophy: innovation only matters if it’s accessible. By releasing the client SDK publicly, Ceeblue invites developers, integrators, and researchers to contribute to the next generation of real-time streaming.
The goal isn’t to own the standard, but to evolve it, collaboratively.
As Danny Burns puts it:
“WebRTS was never meant to be a walled garden. It’s meant to show that sub-second streaming can be open, interoperable, and universal. The forward-looking WebRTS framework we’ve created works with the infrastructure the world already has today, and will work with whatever protocols and standards come tomorrow.”
What Comes Next
Winning the Streaming Media European Innovation Award is both an honor and a validation. It marks a moment where the industry is acknowledging that real-time isn’t just a specialist tool anymore but instead the future of content delivery.
WebRTS is already reshaping iGaming, sports betting, and corporate communications. But its biggest impact is yet to come: mainstream broadcasting, live sports, and large-scale entertainment are now on the cusp of transitioning to sub-second latency as the default.
In a few years, we’ll look back at 30–60-second “live” delays as something quaint, like dial-up modems or pixelated webcams.
Ceeblue’s win at the 2025 Streaming Media European Innovation Awards is a sign of what’s next: a streaming world where “live” really means now.
