Ultra-Low Latency
Glass-to-glass latency under one second, from camera lens to viewer screen. Storm's custom protocol stack delivers this consistently — even behind Cloudflare or Fastly, even on unstable networks, even across distributed clusters.
Dedicated components
Storm includes everything you need to stream live — and the components do more than off-the-shelf players and broadcasters. They're built into the server, aware of stream state, and ready to embed in your own app.
Player
One player engine, every platform. Native libraries for web, mobile, and TV — same low-latency core, same real-time signaling, your branding throughout.
Real-time stream awareness
Players stay in continuous dialogue with the server — three parallel channels deliver stream data, broadcast state changes, and report player metrics back. When a stream starts, ends, or recovers, the player reacts instantly. When a viewer's playback degrades, the server knows immediately. No polling, no reconnect logic, no "stream not found" pages — you decide what happens at every state transition.
Webcaster
Storm's broadcaster works the other way around — capture live from a browser, mobile app, or desktop, with bandwidth-adaptive streaming and live feedback. Same SDK ecosystem, mirror of the player.
Cluster & Scaling
Storm scales from a single server to a multi-node cluster spanning your data center, the cloud, or both. Add capacity when traffic grows, distribute load by geography, transcode where it makes sense — all without redeploying anything.
Start simple, scale up
Begin with one Storm instance handling everything — ingest, transcoding, viewers — for small deployments or testing. When you need more capacity, split responsibilities across dedicated cluster nodes and grow horizontally.
Specialized node roles
Each node in a Storm cluster has a specific responsibility — and each can scale independently.
Mono
All-in-one server handling ingest, transcoding, and playback in a single instance. Perfect for small deployments, development, and testing.
Origin
Stream entry point — receives and authorizes incoming streams from broadcasters. Can also handle transcoding and viewers in smaller clusters.
Transcode
Dedicated re-encoding node. Pulls streams from Origin, transcodes them into multiple quality variants, and pushes results back to the cluster.
Edge
Viewer-facing distribution node. Pulls streams from Origin or Transcode and serves them to end users — scale this role to handle viewer load.
Deploy anywhere
Run your cluster entirely on-premise, entirely in the cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, Hetzner — any infrastructure that runs Java), or mix both. Add cloud nodes during traffic spikes, scale them down when traffic settles. Storm doesn't care where its nodes live — only how they're configured.
Real-time monitoring
See exactly what's happening across your streaming platform — from each viewer's playback experience to every node's load. Storm collects telemetry continuously, aggregates it across the cluster, and surfaces it in real time. No external APM tools, no extra integration, no blind spots.
Viewer health
Storm knows what every viewer experiences — and translates raw metrics into a clear quality grade, from Critical to Excellent. The player reports back continuously, so quality issues surface immediately, not after a support ticket arrives.
Stream health
Storm knows when a stream is healthy — and when it's drifting toward problems. The same six-tier grading applies: Critical to Excellent, based on what Storm sees coming from the source. Catch encoder issues, A/V drift, and timing problems before they reach viewers.
Node & cluster health
Every Storm node reports its own load and capacity — CPU, memory, network throughput, and how close it is to its configured limits. The Cluster Manager aggregates everything into a single view, so you can see hot nodes, saturated links, and traffic flow between Origin, Transcode, and Edge — all in real time.
Plus per-node thread pool diagnostics for deep performance tuning
AI Features
Storm ships with built-in AI integration for two distinct workloads — content enrichment (transcription, translation) and active stream monitoring (decisions that affect what your viewers see). Plug in any compatible model — local, self-hosted, or cloud service — and Storm handles the rest.
Live transcription and translation
Connect any AI transcription model — Whisper, cloud APIs, your own self-hosted instance — and Storm generates real-time captions during the live stream. Translate on the fly into any language the model supports. No external pipeline, no third-party SaaS dependency, no per-minute usage fees beyond your model provider's.
OWN MODEL Whisper, OpenAI, Anthropic, local Ollama, anything API-compatible
CAPTIONS Transcribe during the live stream, not after recording
TRANSLATION Limited only by your model's capabilities
CONTROL Pay your model provider directly, no Storm middleware fees
AI stream monitoring
Configure an AI model in the control panel and Storm starts feeding it the stream — frames, transcription, and metadata together. The model gets the full picture and decides what to do. Storm executes. What the AI can do:
THE STREAM Instantly disconnect when content violates policy
STREAM STATE Publish, unpublish, flag for review
RECORDING Start or stop recording based on what's on screen
Transcoding
Storm transcodes streams across software and hardware pipelines — NVENC, AMF, QuickSync. Configure presets in the control panel, no command-line tweaking required. Players adapt to ladder changes in real time, so quality switches stay smooth even when the available qualities change mid-stream.
Single application transcoding
On Mono or Origin applications, Storm matches presets to source quality automatically. A 720p stream gets the 480p variant added, but skips the 1080p preset that's pointless to upscale. Configure presets once — Storm decides which ones make sense per stream.
Cluster-wide transcoding
In a cluster, dedicated Transcode nodes handle the workload — pulling streams from Origin, encoding into target qualities, and pushing variants back to Edge nodes for distribution.
The Cluster Manager decides which streams get transcoded based on a weighted priority system. By default, the most-watched streams win. Need different priorities? The Cluster Manager can query an external endpoint to fetch per-stream weights from your business logic:
CAPACITY
Essentials
Control & API
Full programmatic control over single nodes and the entire cluster. 130+ documented endpoints for streams, viewers, configuration, and metrics.
Get notified when streams start, stop, or change state. Wire Storm into your existing systems — Slack, monitoring tools, CRM, anything with an HTTP endpoint.
Role-based panel access for admins, operators, and read-only viewers. Each role with its own set of permissions.
Reliability & distribution
Configure primary plus backup ingest sources for any stream. If the primary drops, Storm switches to the backup automatically.
Drop-in support for Fastly, Cloudflare, and any CDN that speaks HTTPS. Protect your origin without rebuilding your stack.
Push streams to YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, X, Instagram, or any RTMP destination — in parallel, without giving up control of your origin.
Access & monetization
Stream aliases create paywalls, time-limited access, and PPV mechanics on top of any live stream. Revoke an alias, and viewers disconnect immediately.
Signed URLs prevent unauthorized stream embedding. Tokens can include expiration, IP binding, and per-stream permissions.
Restrict streams by country or region. Built into Storm, no separate CDN configuration required.
Want to see how it actually performs?
Book a live demo with our team — we'll walk you through your use case, show you the metrics, and answer anything you throw at us.