Cerberus Tech Scaled Live IP Video Globally

Founded over a decade ago, Cerberus Tech set out with a clear mission: strip the complexity out of live video. Its vision was to democratize the industry by abstracting away cloud friction, allowing anyone — from seasoned engineers to local operators — to deploy professional-grade IP video without specialized cloud expertise.

“We move live video from anywhere on earth to anywhere it needs to go, using the internet as the backbone,” said Chris Clarke, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Cerberus. To promote resilience, Cerberus designed its Livelink platform to be cloud-agnostic from day one. With built-in failover logic and dynamic routing across multiple providers, the platform ensures the feed remains live even if a specific provider or region experiences an outage.

Founded over a decade ago, Cerberus Tech set out with a clear mission: strip the complexity out of live video. Its vision was to democratize the industry by abstracting away cloud friction, allowing anyone — from seasoned engineers to local operators — to deploy professional-grade IP video without specialized cloud expertise.

“We move live video from anywhere on earth to anywhere it needs to go, using the internet as the backbone,” said Chris Clarke, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Cerberus. To promote resilience, Cerberus designed its Livelink platform to be cloud-agnostic from day one. With built-in failover logic and dynamic routing across multiple providers, the platform ensures the feed remains live even if a specific provider or region experiences an outage.

As Cerberus grew, it encountered the rigid financial realities of the traditional cloud market. While hyperscalers offered massive throughput, their high egress fees made 24/7 live video commercially difficult to sustain. Conversely, lower-cost providers often lacked the performance and global reach required for high-stakes broadcasting.

“We were continually challenged to make the technical cost model fit the commercial model,” Clarke explained. Cerberus was forced into a lose-lose choice: launch smaller, fragmented environments to dodge egress fees, or sacrifice margins to run large-scale workloads on hyperscalers.

CTO Brad Carter underscored the pressure: “For live IP video, cost, speed, and throughput are everything. We could get the throughput from hyperscalers, but the price point was a nonstarter for a 24/7 business.”

Global expansion demanded a more flexible model. To slash latency and maximize reliability — especially in high-growth markets like Asia-Pacific and Australia — Cerberus needed to deploy resources at the edge, closer to the end user.

Akamai’s distributed cloud footprint was the game changer. “Akamai’s global coverage meant we could deploy closer to our customers without changing our architecture,” said Carter. “We could set up in new regions in minutes instead of days or weeks.”

Reliability also required dedicated resources. In live broadcasting, shared infrastructure can lead to unpredictable performance. By leveraging Akamai CPU, Cerberus secured dedicated instances with reserved capacity. This ensures that when a customer initiates a launch, the performance is instant and consistent — optimized for the exacting demands of 24/7 linear broadcasting.

The results were immediate. During testing, Akamai’s deployment speeds were twice as fast as other providers, while throughput matched the hyperscalers at a fraction of the cost.

“Akamai gives us the best of both worlds,” said Clarke. “We get the scale and performance we need without being tied to a cost model that undermines our commercial goals.”

The partnership extended beyond the technology itself. Akamai’s engineering teams were deeply involved in the rollout, enabling Cerberus to integrate the new infrastructure faster than any previous provider. “That speed makes a massive difference to our business,” Carter added.

With Akamai, Cerberus is rethinking what is commercially viable for live video. The combination of scale and cost efficiency has made “satellite replacement” — a move long considered cost-prohibitive — a reality.

“Akamai’s cost model and scale turn old assumptions on their head,” explained Clarke. Looking forward, Cerberus plans to migrate the majority of its live services and internal operations to Akamai, which will serve as the core infrastructure for both customer and internal workloads.

“Akamai gives us the scale of the hyperscalers at a price point that actually makes sense — and that’s key to competing and winning in live IP video,” said Carter.

Clarke concluded: “With Akamai, we can open new territories, explore new distribution models, and grow much faster.”

Cerberus Tech is a global leader in live IP video, empowering broadcasters, streamers, and producers to deliver high-quality content to any corner of the globe. As the world shifted toward “always-on,” low-latency consumption, the company required infrastructure that could scale at hyperscale speeds without a hyperscale price tag. By integrating Akamai into its multicloud strategy, Cerberus expanded its footprint while simultaneously overturning the traditional cost models of live delivery and accelerating its deployment speed.