Nortik

Industries Media & Entertainment

Infrastructures that supportmillions, simultaneously.

AI Engineering and software development for media companies.

Peak traffic doesn't negotiate, and neither does a release date. We build the delivery, discovery, and production systems that streamers, broadcasters, and studios run on: the ones that have to work live, in public, with the whole audience already watching.

Joyn

JoynStreaming at Olympic Scale

Germany's answer to Netflix. Our team architected the platform that carried the Summer Olympics live to hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers, without missing a frame.

450K
Peak concurrent streams
16 days
Of live Olympic coverage
12M
Monthly viewers

Why media companiestrust us with delivery.

Peak is the only load that counts

Traffic here is a cliff, not a curve. A kickoff, a finale drop, a news alert, and the whole audience lands in ten seconds. Capacity that idles all year and holds on the night that counts is the product.

Latency is the experience

Startup time, rebuffer ratio, and how far you sit behind the live feed decide whether someone watches your app or hunts for a pirate stream. Nobody files a complaint about it. They just leave.

Picture quality is a bandwidth bet

4K and HDR look effortless right up until the network narrows. Encoding ladders, per-title tuning, and where the bytes sit decide whether the top rung holds through the busiest hour of the year.

A catalogue only pays when it's found

Most of a library stays invisible without good metadata and a recommender that works on an account with no history. Discovery is where licensing spend earns its return, and that lives in engineering.

AI moved into the edit

Dubbing, subtitling, VFX, and shot-level tagging are already automated. What still needs solving is approval, provenance, and knowing which model touched which frame before it goes to air.

What media demandsfrom engineering and AI.

01A faster content supply chain

Ingest, transcode, QC, subtitling, localisation, and packaging are still the slowest path between a finished master and a playable asset. Shortening time-to-publish means automating that chain and enriching metadata as it moves, which pays back more than any front-end release.

02Personalisation that survives day one

Recommenders are judged on the accounts with no history: a new signup, a shared TV profile, a viewer who came for one live event. Meeting that takes cold-start handling, session context, and honest evaluation against a control, not a model that re-ranks what people were going to watch anyway.

03Monetisation built as one system

Ad decisioning, server-side insertion, subscriber lifecycle, and churn prediction all run against the same playback session. When they are bolted on separately, the viewer feels every seam and the revenue model pays for it.

04A lower cost per delivered hour

At streaming volumes, a few percent off egress is a line item leadership notices. Encoding ladders, multi-CDN steering, storage tiering, and where the cache sits are what separate a platform that scales from one that scales expensively.

The Nortik engineering floor

Words from the front lines of Media Tech.

Get In Touch
Filip ĆurčićNortik logo
Filip Ćurčić
Sr. Software Engineer, Nortik
Working on Joyn was my first encounter with a Netflix-level software architecture, and the EPG was one of the hardest parts of it. The app has to know what is playing on every channel at any minute, but that schedule comes from dozens of partners who rarely agree. Today I look at live streaming platforms differently.

Nortik’s Impact

The EPG scheduling service behind Joyn's live TV: many partner feeds normalised into one timeline per channel, rights windows applied before anything reaches a viewer, and corrections live in seconds.

Frequently asked questions

Everything teams usually want to know before building streaming and media software. Not here? Ask us directly.

Yes. Joyn is the clearest example: our team architected the platform behind Germany's largest streaming service, which carried the Summer Olympics live at 450,000 concurrent streams.

That is the level the architecture gets designed for: encoding, delivery, entitlement, and failover treated as one system rather than services that happen to sit next to each other.

Live is where most platforms find out what they actually built. We design for the peak first, with headroom, load-shedding, graceful degradation, and a rehearsed failover path, then work backwards to what steady state should cost.

That includes the parts nobody demos: origin shielding, multi-CDN steering, and knowing exactly which experience degrades first when a region goes hot.

Entitlement is architecture here, not configuration. Windows, territories, blackouts, device tiers, and concurrency limits get modelled up front, because retrofitting them means rebuilding the request path.

We work with Widevine, FairPlay, and PlayReady through the usual DRM providers, and build the audit trail your rights holders will eventually ask you for.

Usually, yes. Most of the saving sits in the encoding ladder, per-title tuning, cache hit ratio, and where traffic is steered, not in switching vendor.

We measure it the way finance does: cost per delivered hour, tracked against startup time and rebuffer ratio, so a saving that degrades playback shows up immediately instead of in next quarter's churn.

Metadata enrichment and shot-level tagging, recommendations and search, localisation and subtitling, ad decisioning, and automated QC in the content supply chain. Those pay back on measurable numbers: time-to-publish, discovery, retention.

Generative work in production is real too, and we build it: dubbing, VFX, versioning. It ships with approval steps and provenance attached, because an unreviewed frame going to air is a brand problem, not a model problem.

You do. Code, trained models, pipelines, and documentation are yours, along with the infrastructure access to run them without us.

We hand over a codebase your own team can pick up. Nothing we build is designed to keep you dependent on us.

Your AI team is ready.Are you?

Let's shape the future of AI, together.