Stef van der Ziel

Jet-Stream founder and owner Stef van der Ziel is an entrepreneur and inventor. Van der Ziel is a streaming media and CDN veteran and innovator. In 1994 at age 21 he was one of the first pioneers in webcasting. In 1996 he managed to overload the Internet with massive live webcasts.

Van der Ziel was one of the first to recognize the power of the Internet and its potential to liberate and revolutionize broadcasting. He also identified scalability and reliability challenges. To solve these, van der Ziel invented advanced streaming media focused content delivery technologies in the mid and late nineties.

In 2002 Stef van der Ziel wanted to further design, commercialize and market his technologies and founded Jet-Stream which today is the market leader for CDN intelligence, CDN technology innovation and CDN technologies licensing for mobile operators, broadband access providers, telecom operators, broadcasters, carriers and cable operators. 

In 2004 Stef van der Ziel also founded StreamZilla, Europe's leading streaming media CDN that delivers billions premium mobile, web and OTT streams for hundreds of professional content owners including leading brands in sports, broadcasting, enterprises, publishing, video production and studios. 

Stef van der Ziel:

"For most people proper education is the only serious way to success. But many entrepreneurs become successful not because but despite education. There were no studies that could learn me the stuff I do… I dropped out of high school. I am 100% autodidact and proud of it. I pioneered my first webcast in 1994 at age 21. That was the start of my career as a streaming media and Content Delivery Network specialist and entrepreneur.

I have a personal motivation. My commercial activities are based upon my personal motivations, visions and ambitions. I foresaw a that the Internet would liberate broadcasting. If I could broadcast video globally, then anyone would be able to do so. In a matter of time, all content would be distributed via the web to PC’s, mobile clients and TV’s.

My personal motivation was – and is – to scale the web for professional, massive content delivery, to liberalize broadcasting, to disrupt but also help the traditional cable and broadcasting industry and to break open this market so anyone could create, distribute and consume content, anywhere, without borders.

I am doing this by offering professional internet, OTT and mobile content delivery services and by developing cutting edge technologies so telcos, mobile operators and anyone can build their own scalable video delivery infrastructure that go beyond the best effort CDNs as we know today."

Personal life

My beautiful wife and I got married in 2009. She is very intelligent and she understands my work mentality, she works hard herself too. We got married in a nearby castle and had a great afterparty in our own backyard. 

Our daughter was born in 2010. No matter how tired I am from traveling or working, she always gets a smile on my face. She so sweet. We play and I love teaching her the small and big things in life.

We live in the Drenthe province, which has beautiful forests, pastures and heathlands. Our home is an old farmhouse with a thatched roof. We modernized the house. It is very well isolated and I am planning to add solar panels. We use groundwater for the garden.

It is a great relaxing place to be and to have friends over. The pastures are turned into a large park-like backyard with ponds and trees. The old orchard is kept intact. We have five cats who chase away the mice. Herons ate our fish and hedgehogs love our shrubs. We have many birds per season. I have a rifle but I only shoot cans. 

I am very dedicated to what I do. I love being independent. I have an enormous drive to change, to innovate and to improve. Sometimes I can drive people crazy with my urge to do things better, but I can also make them do more than they think they can do themselves and that is rewarding for everyone. 

The streaming and CDN industry is really exciting. I can use and invent technologies that change two entire industries: telecoms and media.

Technology, design and media have always been my focus since I was a child. I built my own AM transmitter, I opened our TVs, radios and cameras at home to learn how they worked (sorry :). I enjoyed pranking with phones, equipment at school and with my Commodore64. I programmed light shows for it for parties. My dad used to work at a large computer facility where he showed me the mainframes and let me play with email. He showed me one of the first Macintoshes. My first Mac was a horribly expensive machine and I took it to the limits with Photoshop 1 and QuarkXPress. During events I was always backstage, producing media, managing stage lights or producing marketing material.

I bought a Mac with video capturing and video out capabilities and digital video became a new passion. When I hooked it up to a modem, I saw the opportunity to stream video live via the Internet. That was over 17 years ago and I made a living by washing dishes. That changed for the better. 

My hobbies are music, photography, filming, my drum kit, clothes and traveling. I've recently been to Canada, Norway, England, France, Spain, the USA, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Sweden. I am interested in politics but have no time for it. I don't like people who abuse our great system and let others pay for their hobbies. I also can't appreciate intelligent people who don't use their intelligence but choose easy jobs instead. What I really don't like is people stealing ideas and technologies. We are proud that we conceptualize and design and develop everything in-house. Copying is not just illegal, it is intellectual poverty.

Oh and I love cars. I am a very conscious person. I don't gamble, I don't smoke, I hardly drink, I even pay my taxes in time. Allow me one 'bad' but extremely fun hobby: speeding in fuel guzzling cars. Vroooom! I owned Jeep Cherokees, a Mini Cooper S, a Land Rover Discovery and a BMW 650. My current daily drive is a BMW 535d with M-sports and Hamann design. And yes it is completely decadent but I also own two Range Rovers, both V8, one supercharged. My coolest car though is a Maserati Quattroporte Sport GT S with that brutal 4.7 engine and the sport exhausts. I'm not the person to brag about stuff but this thing is just awesome... if it didn't break down every other month ;)