Every millisecond is a business model: New opportunities in real-time streaming with Red5
In this edition of our Future State of Streaming series, we caught up with Chris Allen, the CEO and co-founder of Red5. Chris has been at the forefront of the streaming media industry since the mid-2000s, when he and a group of engineers reverse-engineered RTMP to break open the world of live video.
Today, he’s looking at a future that is much more interactive, much cheaper, and surprisingly more human.
Low latency opens new business models
For a long time, real-time streaming (latency under 250 milliseconds) was a niche requirement. But as the world moves online, "near-real-time" is no longer good enough.
"Latency is becoming less acceptable," Chris explains. "People are expecting the video on a live event to actually be live, as opposed to this delayed thing." Take sports betting, for example. In markets like Brazil, where regulation has recently lifted, the difference between a three-second delay and a real-time stream is the difference between a fair bet and a missed opportunity. It's the same for live auctions. If a remote bidder sees the "sold" gavel drop three seconds after the person in the room, the trust in the system evaporates.
But the use cases go far beyond entertainment. Red5 is seeing a surge in "serious" applications like drone monitoring and traffic management. "We’ve got a lot of things with live drone streaming and IP cameras—traffic monitoring and being able to solve crimes in real time. All of those things require real-time latency," Chris says.
Breaking the cost barrier with Media over QUIC
Historically, there was a "latency tax." If you wanted real-time video via WebRTC, it could cost you ten times more than a standard delayed stream. For many companies, that was a dealbreaker.
That is about to change with an emerging protocol called Media over QUIC (MoQ).
"We’re at the forefront of this new emerging protocol called MoQ," Chris says. "That’s going to bring down the price even more because you’ve got large CDNs getting involved with it."
The goal is simple: remove the cost barrier so that real-time becomes the default, not the premium. As Chris puts it: "If we remove that barrier... then everybody’s going to pick the real-time latency option."
You might expect giants like YouTube, Meta, and Akamai to guard their streaming secrets. Instead, they are collaborating. This "co-opetition" is best seen in the OpenMOQ consortium, where rivals work together on open standards while still competing for customers. It’s a dynamic Chris describes as a "rising tide that raises all boats." Even at the infrastructure level, Red5 sees itself as a "graduating step" for developers who start on AWS but eventually need more robust features. In this new era, you can be a partner, a competitor, and a joint solution for a customer all at once.
Video is becoming a data application
The future of streaming isn't just video, it's video synced with massive amounts of data. Chris points to the F1 and MLB apps as early blueprints. In these experiences, you aren't just a passive viewer; you are picking your own camera angles, viewing real-time car stats, and seeing graphic overlays powered by field sensors.
"The data and the video need to be synced and work well together to create these new things," Chris notes. This opens the door for augmented reality (AR) shopping, where a creator can talk about a product while a 3D visualization of that product appears in your actual living room in real-time.
For a deeper technical breakdown of how synchronized video and data pipelines work in practice, see Red5’s recent blog, “Real-Time Data Streaming for Live Video,” which explains the architecture required to align video, telemetry, messaging, and application logic at ultra-low latency, and how it solves business and organizational challenges.
The far horizon: AI, AR, and the human premium
When we looked five to ten years out, Chris’s predictions took a turn toward the sci-fi and the deeply personal.
On the hardware side, he expects the smartphone’s reign to end. "Smartphones are going to go away," he predicts, suggesting they will be replaced by AR glasses (like the latest Meta frames) or even neural implants that allow us to "think" our connections.
But as generative AI and bots become more convincing, the value of "real" connection will skyrocket.
"I think we’re going to find that real human beings and real things are going to matter a lot because there’s going to be so much fake stuff," says Chris, who is also a jazz musician. Just as handmade tailoring became a premium luxury in the age of fast fashion, "real" live performance and verified, un-altered video will become the new gold standard.
Technology will shift from just delivering pixels to proving that those pixels represent a real human moment.
To learn more about Chris Allen’s work, connect with him on LinkedIn. Check out the case study to understand more of the partnership between Red5 and PubNub.
