Marcel Poelstra

Small Business Owner, streaming media, and Consultant in Harderwijk, Netherlands

What I do

I'm a freelance consultant working in video streaming. Broadcasters, operators and media companies bring me in when their OTT or IPTV service isn't performing the way it should, or when they're planning something new and want to get the setup right before they commit to it.

I've worked with video over IP since the late 1990s, back when getting video to play over a network was still extremely hard. Most of what I know I learned by building things, and falling into every pitfall and having seen all rabbit holes, and a fair bit of it isn't written down anywhere.

How I can help

Fixing an existing service.
If your streaming service has problems with quality, buffering, cost or reliability, I'll look at how it's actually built, work out what's causing the issue, and tell you what to do about it.

Planning a new one.
Decisions about protocols, encoding, vendors and CDN setup are too expensive to undo later. I help you make those calls up front, based on how this technology behaves in practice rather than how it looks in a sales pitch.

CDN and distribution.
Choosing how and where to distribute your video has a big effect on cost and viewer experience. I can help you design that side of things, or review what you already have.

A second opinion.
Sometimes you just want someone independent to look at a roadmap or a vendor proposal and say whether it holds up. I'm happy to do that too.

Background

My career started in the early days of video over IP and video compression in the late 1990s, and I've followed the streaming and telecoms industry closely ever since. Alongside the streaming work, I have a solid technical footing in Linux, cloud and IP networking, which means I can stay really close to the engineering when a project needs it. Decades in broadcast and telecoms have also given me a feel for where the industry is heading, not just where it is now.