Broadcast is theft.

How many hours do you stream?

Let's pretend we're a production team with one video channel and three rungs of 4K video. This is a simple setup, but here's how much money we save yearly by using Zeus vs a traditional live provider:

Savings Per Year $42,000-$56,000

Hours / month

120

It's 2026 and the World Cup is in 1080p. Why? Because 4K is the leading cause of bankruptcy in production teams! A typical live encoder costs $52,000 upfront, plus $8/hour for rent in the cloud (minimum), not including storage and egress, and another $32,000 per year for licensing. You're going to spend $100k+ a year! SpatialGen Zeus Lite is a one-time $26,000 lifetime purchase with NO ADDITIONAL FEES. In fact, you could deploy two Zeus units for redundancy and still spend less than today's solution. 4K live streaming should be the default, otherwise, this is a clown world. https://spatialgen.com/live

Live broadcast is the money maker in the media business. Because of this, companies have been built to extract recurring revenue at every stage. The broadcaster pays for the encoder, the software license, the cloud license, the virtual machines, and the CDN. The more ambitious the production, the more recurring costs are added. The more recurring costs are added, the more the broadcaster is trapped into a proprietary workflow that cannot be repeated without paying again.

Let's follow the journey of a live broadcaster from when their final ProRes 2110 feed is complete and needs to go out to the audience.

The broadcaster already has the feed. The creative and technical work has already happened. Yet the moment that feed needs to become a stream, the industry asks the broadcaster to pay another encoder, another license, another cloud channel, another VM bill, another delivery chain, all that works only while you're paying. This is like paying a utility provider!

Apple Immersive Video makes that problem impossible to ignore. The format demands the world's largest bitrates, spatial audio, spatial metadata, an untraditional codec, and live reliability at the same time.

SpatialGen has spent years fixing similar problems on the VOD side of the industry, and is part of Apple's official Apple Immersive Video workflows. We presented at the Apple Developer Center in Cupertino to explain how we handle the format's requirements. Zeus was built from that same mindset.

SpatialGen Zeus: The Modern Live Model

When we were building a live solution for Apple Immersive Video, we realized that we simply could not build a workflow in the cloud. The feed was too large to send as a contribution stream, and the format's requirements were/are not supported by most cloud encoders.

So we rethought live from the ground up. A ProRes 2110 stream is ingested, encoded into a VBR ladder and then sent to the CDN for delivery. The entire cloud workflow that used to be rented is now a system that the broadcaster owns and reuses without asking permission or paying monthly.

The trap is not that cloud encoding exists. The trap is letting every new rung become a recurring payment.

We built two separate systems for different production scales. Zeus Lite is a single-rack system that supports SDI and 2110, handles a 4K UHD+ feed, and produces a full VBR ladder. Zeus Lite has lower hardware costs, and thus is only a one-time $26,000 purchase. Zeus is our live system for larger productions. It can handle multiple UHD+ feeds, a 16K+ video feed, and is a one-time $65,000 purchase. Both systems come with a lifetime software license, and both systems can be redeployed for future productions without recurring costs.

For a one-off experiment, recurring cloud costs can feel convenient. For a serious broadcast program, they become a tax on ambition.

SpatialGen gives broadcasters the capability to be ambitious.

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