Restream - Ukrainian stream service known around the world

Restream is a cloud service that allows you to stream video content simultaneously to multiple platforms, it works with more than 30 services, including YouTube, Twitch and social networks. Restream supports multi-chat with viewers of different platforms, provides analytics and a video scheduler.

The startup was founded by Andrey Surzhinsky and Alexander Khuda in 2015, now the company has two offices - in the USA and in Ukraine, the team consists of 45 people.

According to its own data, more than 8 million broadcasts are conducted monthly through Restream with a coverage of 800 million viewers. Among the company's clients are Microsoft, Cisco, Ubisoft, Google, AMD and Epic Games.

That was seven years ago, in 2015. Before Restream, the team had a company that was also related to streaming and education. They tried to make a startup called Tutorsband and spent four years on it, and it did not take off in the end.

Andrey Surzhinsky, co-founder of Restream, and I analyzed the mistakes and decided to try something new and not create a streaming platform: this is how the idea of Restream was born - a project in which live video is distributed everywhere at once. - says Alexandr Khuda.

They assembled the first version of Restream quickly, but it worked and looked rather poor. Guys saw that people started using Restream, despite the problems - it was a sign that there was something in the idea.

At the first, Alexandr and Andrey focused on the CIS and received a negative comments: Russian-speaking users told them "this thing would not take off", "this is garbage", and more. But English-speaking users became interested and supported the idea.

Something was unclear - was it necessary to put servers closer to the user, to find providers that would provide power at a good price, with good networks and hardware? Well, yes, but it took a lot of time.

Initially, the service was written "on the knee", the team had no experience, so what Alexandr and Andrey wrote was rewritten countless times: Alex and Andrey weren't high-class engineers. But people still enjoyed it.

They made the first version of the product without investors: it was impossible to find them - such a service did not exist in the world yet. In Eastern Europe, they mainly invest in clones of successful companies from Western Europe, when the business model works, everything is rolled back.

Therefore, we borrowed money from friends, rented servers and developed the product, then made the Donate button to collect donations. Since we didn't find investors further, we had to make additional paid features and capabilities. - says Alexandr.

Soon, the team started to earn a couple of thousand dollars a month, after that they received the first investments - from guys who had not yet been seen live. They are from Moscow, Alexander Petrov and Ivan Sezonov from Iskra Ventures, invested $50,000.

I persuaded them for two months, and now they are very satisfied. Nothing could have happened without these guys - he adds.

The paid model began with one-time payments. We tried to understand what people are willing to spend money on, and for the sake of experiment, we began to accept $ 5-7 for an additional upgrade.

For example, because the service was free, streamers began streaming the same content to multiple channels, say YouTube. It looked more like spam. We decided that we needed to carefully limit the option, and started selling additional channels on one platform for $5-7.

Every time a user paid, they had to be reminded every month that features might be disabled. But then we clicked: subscription! You can sign once and automatically accept payments.

Then the product evolved a lot, we added a lot of features, branding in broadcasts, the ability to add and manage channels in real time, switch them - such pro-things.

"The most successful case — we earned $5,000 per broadcast hour. A large company had an event, and it asked for help with it. We showed how and what, but the customer wanted us to control everything. Named this amount, the company was ready. The easiest $5,000 you could ever earn." - says Alexandr.

"We have pioneered the broadcasting market on multiple platforms. To use our service, it was necessary to connect applications for capturing video and broadcasts - OBS, XSplit and other encoders. Similarly, Restream can be connected to Zoom or GoPro." - he adds.

But Restream didn't have an "all in one" solution - only a cloud to which you connect other software. This has worked well for pros and gamers who understand the subject and can customize everything.

But since the market is changing and more and more other areas are starting to use live video, the team decided to launch Studio, a video production service in which everything you need can be done through Restream in the browser - no need to connect OBS and other things.

It will help people without deep streaming skills to stream in a professional way. You can add watermarks, graphics, and the like without complicated settings.

It has remained the same: we want to help democratize streaming, provide an opportunity for distribution and monetization of content, and improve the lives of creators and viewers.

We believe that our service will create millions of jobs, and we strive for this: content creators should be appreciated. If you can do it, it should be paid.

We had this idea with the last company ten years ago, but it was necessary for society to come to this. We are in a good location with a good product and team. Therefore, we announced a round of investments: we believe that we can do more.