At NAB 2026 we sat down with Dave Simon of Backblaze, plus Jason Shore and Ari Burt of Sardius Media, at the Backblaze booth for our Fireside chat to break down how they architect tier-one live broadcasts for millions of concurrent viewers.

• Lock-in is now a liability: after the 2025 AWS, Cloudflare, and GCP outages, most ops teams treat single-vendor reliance as a real operational risk, which makes resilience table stakes.
• Feature access is the stronger argument: no provider leads on AV1 encoding, CMAF low-latency packaging, and storage egress economics at the same time, so a multi-vendor workflow keeps you current across all of them.
• Latency-weighted routing: Sardius runs a race per HTTP request across multiple S3-compatible origins. Backblaze B2 wins about 80% of requests, and secondary origins absorb the remaining 20% with no manifest churn.
• Close to a single storage bill: segments don’t need to live in every bucket, so eventual consistency keeps storage costs near a single copy.
• Failures stay contained: when us-east-1 went down in 2025, Sardius kept its high-dollar live events serving.
• Qencode runs the encoding tier: per-title optimization cuts file sizes by 60% on average without measurable VMAF loss, with 3x faster startup times and proportional CDN egress savings.

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Resilience is easy to fund after an outage. The harder sell, and the one Sardius makes, is about staying current: no single vendor leads on encoding speed, packaging, rate control, and egress pricing at once, and whoever leads today won’t lead forever. Splitting the pipeline across specialists lets Sardius keep the best option at each layer without re-architecting every time the rankings shift.

The architecture

Sardius runs a latency-weighted race per HTTP request. Each viewer segment request gets resolved against multiple S3-compatible origins, and whichever returns headers first serves the body. Three things stood out from how Ari described it.

Backblaze B2 wins about 80% of requests on global footprint
Measured across millions of segment fetches per event, Backblaze B2 picks up roughly 80% of the load. Secondary origins absorb the remaining 20% without manifest churn, and the same primary origin handles the long tail of segments.

Segments do not need to exist in every bucket
The manifest points at whichever origin currently holds the file. Since the storage layer only needs eventual consistency, Sardius pays for roughly one storage unit of cost rather than four. That’s what makes a multi-vendor video workflow affordable at broadcast scale.

“I love Backblaze because I never think about it. It just works. If I think about a storage provider, that means they’re probably getting fired.”

— Ari Burt, Co-founder, Sardius Media

Single-provider failure does not propagate
When us-east-1 went down last year, Sardius kept its high-dollar live events serving. The architecture treats any single origin as non-load-bearing, so a regional outage at one provider does not turn into a viewer-facing incident.

Where Qencode fits

Qencode runs the encoding tier of the multi-vendor video workflow. Our custom-trained per-title optimization models drop file sizes by 60% on average without measurable VMAF loss, which produces 3x faster startup times and proportional cuts on storage and CDN egress. Sardius pushes mezzanines in, adaptive bitrate ladders come out, and Backblaze stores the result.

The three teams have shipped together for nearly 10 years. None of them would still be working together if any one were a single point of failure for the others. That principle shows up in the architecture itself, where no single provider is load-bearing, and it is the principle the next decade of media infrastructure will be built on.

Frequently asked questions

What is a multi-vendor video workflow?
It is a video production and delivery architecture that uses different specialized vendors for each layer of the pipeline, typically encoding, storage, and delivery, rather than consolidating into a single all-in-one platform. The goal is to stay current on best-of-breed features at each layer (AV1 encoding, CMAF packaging, storage egress economics, AI-driven optimization) while removing any single vendor as a point of failure.

Why is vendor lock-in considered a liability now?
The 2025 cascade of AWS, Cloudflare, and GCP outages made the operational cost of single-vendor reliance visible. Beyond resilience, no single provider leads on every feature dimension that matters for modern video (AV1 encoding speed, CMAF low-latency packaging, neural-net rate control, storage egress economics) at the same time. Lock-in now means waiting on one vendor’s roadmap across all of them.

How does Sardius Media route between multiple storage providers?
Sardius runs a latency-weighted race per HTTP request. Each viewer segment request is resolved against multiple S3-compatible origins, and whichever returns headers first serves the body. Across millions of segment fetches per event, Backblaze B2 wins about 80% of requests, with the remaining 20% absorbed by secondary origins without manifest churn.

Do all segments need to be replicated to every storage provider?
No, the manifest points at whichever origin currently holds the file. Eventual consistency at the storage layer keeps the architecture economical: roughly one storage unit of cost, not four. This is what makes a multi-vendor video workflow affordable at broadcast scale.

What does Qencode do in the workflow?
Qencode handles the encoding tier. Custom-trained per-title optimization models drop file sizes by 60% on average without measurable VMAF loss, producing 3x faster startup times and proportional cuts on storage and CDN egress costs. Mezzanines go in, adaptive bitrate ladders come out, ready for Backblaze to store and the CDN race to deliver.

Where can I watch the full NAB 2026 fireside chat?
On YouTube: How Sardius Media Built a Multi-Vendor M&E Workflow with Backblaze and Qencode.

Speakers

• Dave Simon, Sr. Director M&E Alliances, Backblaze
• Jason Shore, CEO and co-founder, Sardius Media
• Ari Burt, Co-founder, Sardius Media
• Murad Mordukhay, CEO and co-founder, Qencode

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