From 11–14 September at IBC2026 in Amsterdam (Stand 5.G56), Scalstrm will be showing 110 broadcast-grade HD channels transcoded and packaged on a single 1U server, and what that does to the economics of live video.
Because the cost of running a live channel is no longer set by the software licence. It is set by the infrastructure that software demands.
Most Operators Know Their Price. Far Fewer Know Their Cost.
Almost every operator can quote a cost per channel per month. Very few can produce the number underneath it.
That number is spread across at least six budget lines, and they rarely report to the same person. Hardware sits in capex. Licences sit in opex. The colocation contract is negotiated by a facilities team that may never have spoken to video engineering. Power may not be metered separately. Cooling is bundled into the facility rate and therefore invisible. Operational time is often not costed at all.
Each line gets optimized in isolation. Nobody owns the total.
Space and Power Became Scarce, and the Market Repriced
Two of those hidden costs have moved sharply in the wrong direction.
Data centre vacancy in North America fell to a record 1.4% at the end of 2025, with average asking rates in primary markets reaching roughly 196 US dollars per kW per month. In Europe, constrained grid capacity in the established data centre corridors keeps pricing elevated regardless of wholesale energy markets, and lead times from power provisioning to a live rack can run eight to sixteen weeks.
The market has also split. Standard colocation runs at 3–5 kW per rack; high-density AI deployments run at 20–100 kW or more, with far deeper budgets behind them. Media infrastructure is now competing for capacity against workloads that can comfortably outbid it.
The takeaway: power is priced as a scarce commodity and rack space is allocated rather than purchased. Physical footprint has become one of the largest available levers on the cost base, and one of the least examined.
110 Channels, One Rack Unit
This is where the architecture matters.
Scalstrm’s microservice-native platform, running on NETINT video processing units, transcodes and packages 110 broadcast-grade live HD channels within a single rack unit. The density is not a hardware trick. It is the result of software written with no legacy code, in which every processing function scales independently, so nothing is provisioned to cover a bottleneck somewhere else in the chain.
Purpose-built silicon handles the encode workload. Purpose-built software makes full use of it. Neither delivers this alone.
The outcome is 80% less power and rack space for the same output, which is what makes a 50% reduction in total cost of ownership arithmetically possible.
Where the 50% Actually Comes From
The reduction is not a licensing discount. It is four separate savings landing on four different budget lines:
- Fewer servers → smaller hardware bill, shorter refresh cycle, less spares inventory.
- Less power → straight onto the facility invoice, every month, under any metered contract.
- Less cooling → cooling load follows power draw, and bundled rates charge for both.
- Less operational overhead → fewer machines to patch, monitor, replace and evidence to an auditor.
There is a second-order effect that may matter more. When capacity is expensive, headroom is a luxury, so operators provision for the worst hour of the year and carry that peak for the other eight thousand. Collapse the footprint and headroom becomes affordable. Redundancy replaces optimism. A rights opportunity arriving with six weeks of notice becomes answerable in six weeks.
The conclusion: static, over-provisioned infrastructure was affordable when space and power were cheap. Neither is cheap now, and the operators who recalculate first will be the ones setting the terms.
Meet Us at IBC2026
We will be in Amsterdam, 11–14 September, Stand 5.G56. For any team spending more time defending the cost of transcoding than exploring what better economics could unlock, that is the conversation worth having in Amsterdam.
Schedule a meeting: https://calendly.com/d/dz6q-98v-nvs
