LOS GATOS, California, March 4, 2026, 05:36 PST
- Ateme said Netflix signed a multi-year deal to deploy its TITAN Live transcoder for live streaming workflows
- The move points to more investment in live delivery, where glitches are harder to hide than on-demand viewing
- Netflix shares were up about 0.6% in premarket trading
Netflix will deploy French video software firm Ateme’s TITAN Live transcoder under a multi-year agreement aimed at supporting live streaming workflows, Ateme said on Tuesday. 1
The deal lands as Netflix leans harder into live programming, trying to keep viewers engaged and give its ad business more places to run commercials. Live video also forces different engineering choices than the company’s core on-demand service.
Live streams are unforgiving. They need real-time processing and stable delivery, and even short hiccups can become the story. Rivals including Amazon and Disney have used live sports and event programming to hang on to subscribers and chase ad budgets.
Ateme said TITAN Live enables real-time, bandwidth-efficient encoding across several codec formats. A transcoder, in plain terms, compresses and repackages video so it can play smoothly on different devices and connection speeds.
Ateme said the system is built to push video quality higher, using objective measures such as VMAF, a video-quality score, alongside human viewing checks to cut visual flaws. “We aligned on a shared vision, iterated quickly, and executed efficiently,” Thomas Burnichon, vice president of innovation strategy at Ateme, said. 2
The companies did not disclose financial terms.
Netflix shares were up about 0.6% at $97.70 in premarket trading.
Wall Street has been hunting for signs that Netflix’s next leg of growth can come from ads and new formats, not just subscription price rises. On Monday, JPMorgan upgraded Netflix to overweight and raised its view on the company’s positioning around emerging tech, saying “storytelling and talent will remain critical moats,” according to Investopedia. 3
Separately, Netflix co-founder and director Reed Hastings exercised options and sold 410,550 shares for about $39.8 million on Monday, a U.S. securities filing showed. The trades were made under a Rule 10b5-1 plan adopted in 2023. 4
But live programming is a tougher business. One widely watched event with poor quality or interruptions can strain relationships with advertisers and partners, and rights fees for premium live content keep climbing as streamers compete.
Netflix said in November it had begun testing dynamic ad insertion — swapping ads for each viewer in real time during a live stream — and planned to scale the technology across more live titles in 2026. 5
