From Black Box to Embedded: Rethinking Video Infrastructure in 2025

More companies are embedding video into their core workflows – not just for broadcasting, but to support things like remote inspections, virtual healthcare, real-time monitoring, and live auctions. Video infrastructure is becoming a mission critical component, not just content.

At StreamTV 2025, Wowza CEO Krish Kumar and I joined the StreamTV team for a short session on a question we hear constantly: Should you build it yourself, buy something off the shelf, or work with a partner to embed streaming into your product?

Here’s a summary of what we covered, and how we see companies navigating that decision in practice.

Four Approaches to Streaming Video Infrastructure

1. Black Box

Third-party platforms like YouTube. Fast to get started, but limited control over the branding, experience, and monetization.

2. White Label

Rebrandable platforms that offer more polish and a quick onramp, but still limit your ability to integrate, customize workflows, or control the UX.

3. Build It Yourself

Some teams assemble their own stack using tools like FFmpeg or other components. It offers full control, but requires deep video expertise and significant ongoing effort.

4. Embedded Infrastructure

You own the application and experience. The underlying video functionality—ingest, processing, delivery—is handled through APIs and modular services. This gives you control where it matters, first class support, and stability where you need it.

Why We’re Seeing This Shift

Streaming isn’t just for media companies anymore. Increasingly, it’s a foundational part of how businesses operate, enabling real-time collaboration, monitoring, education, and service delivery across industries, while also becoming a key driver of customer experience and brand engagement.

We’re seeing this shift because expectations have changed. Users don’t just consume video; they interact with it. They expect it to be part of the product, not an add-on. And they expect it to work anywhere, on any device, with the highest quality.

As a result, video is becoming a core requirement in:

• Healthcare and telehealth – powering remote consultations, diagnostics, and patient monitoring
• Education and training – supporting real-time instruction, assessments, and workforce development
• Smart city and security systems – enabling real-time visibility across public safety and infrastructure Interactive commerce – allowing live product demos, bidding, and customer engagement
• Virtual collaboration and support – providing direct service, technical support, or peer interaction
• Corporate branding and communications

In many of these cases, teams are building products where video is critical, but not the product itself. They need something reliable and flexible that won’t eat months of development time or require specialized streaming expertise. That’s where embedded streaming infrastructure starts to make a lot more sense.

When Building Breaks Down

We’ve worked with teams that tried to build their own stack end to end. It’s not impossible, but scalable streaming architectures are quite complex and it often takes longer than expected, and becomes hard to support over time.

One organization supporting remote sites in low-connectivity environments started with a custom-built system. While the solution worked, scaling it across locations was slow and costly. They eventually moved to an embedded approach that gave them repeatability with greatly increased reliability.

When Buying Isn’t Enough

On the flip side, we’ve seen teams outgrow white-label solutions quickly. One startup needed to move fast after their original provider hit limitations. Building was too risky for their timeline, so they shifted to an embedded video platform and migrated in under a month with no downtime for their users.

What made that work? Clear, well documented APIs, strong support, and a modular architecture they could actually integrate into their own systems.

Questions to Ask

If you’re exploring video options, here are some of the practical questions we encourage teams to ask:

• Can we realistically build and support this ourselves?
• Do we need control over UX, workflows, and branding?
• Will this need to scale—geographically or by use case?
• Do we need to integrate tightly with our product stack?
• Are there compliance or security requirements?
• Do we need detailed monitoring and analytics?

If the answer is yes to most of these – but you’re not a video company- embedded video infrastructure tends to offer the best path forward.

What Embedded Streaming Looks Like

Embedded streaming isn’t about outsourcing the product experience. It’s about using the right tools so your team can focus on what matters.

The teams that do this well:

• Integrate streaming seamlessly into their application
• Choose the deployment models that fits their business (cloud, on-prem, hybrid)
• Maintain full control of their brand and monetization strategy
• Rely on proven, supported video infrastructure for the heavy lifting (transcoding, protocol handling, security)
• Get the analytics and data they need without reinventing the wheel

It’s not magic. It’s just a different approach to system design, one that prioritizes focus and scale.

Final Thoughts

If video is part of your product – but not the thing you sell – then owning the entire stack probably doesn’t add a lot of value.

The teams we see succeeding are the ones that stay focused. They direct engineering time toward things that differentiate them, which are things like UX, interactivity, and integration – they use embedded services to avoid reinventing complex, low-level systems.

That balance is what lets them move faster, scale more predictably, and deliver better experiences to their users. Need help with your streaming solutions? Talk to one of our experts