STARZ, once a premium cable brand, has evolved into a top-tier streaming platform by investing early in its engineering capabilities. In this interview from the StreamTV Show, Rob Collins, Technical Executive at STARZ, joins CDN77’s Tomas Bacik to discuss how the company delivers seamless performance at scale. From client development to packaging, Collins credits STARZ’s in-house expertise as essential to building a unified, cross-platform experience. With nearly 20 million subscribers across regions, consistent uptime and low latency remain top priorities.
The conversation also explores STARZ’s multi-CDN strategy and growing use of edge computing. As Collins notes, analytics and personalization capabilities are maturing rapidly at the edge—providing real-time insights that shape user experience. While performance and uptime remain nonnegotiable, he emphasizes that a CDN partner’s ability to collaborate, adapt to traffic spikes (like midnight premieres), and align with STARZ’s strategic goals has become equally critical. The key takeaway? Technical excellence alone isn’t enough—partnership and agility are now just as vital in the evolving streaming landscape.
Tomas Bacik:
Hi, I'm Tom. I'm the VP of Client Solutions at CDN77, and today I'm joined by Rob Collins, the technical executive of STARZ streaming platform. Hi Rob.
Rob Collins:
Hello Tom.
Tomas Bacik:
We're at the StreamTV Show in Denver, and today we're going to talk a bit about STARZ platform and your CDN vendor selection approach. Rob, before we dive into CDNs, I want to ask a bit about platform itself. I know that STARZ consistently receives a lot of praise for excellent performance across a variety of platforms and devices, and I know you have a software engineering background. What would you say are the main technical and design principles that actually help you to deliver multi-platform services reliable at scale?
Rob Collins:
It goes back a little ways. STARZ began life as a premium cable channel, it had a running start. It's over 30 years old now, and at some point the leadership had the vision to say, "Streaming is really going to be the future of video delivery." Getting on that early, they necessitated building up a lot of capabilities internally, getting a engineering team that not only could scale these applications, but could learn those things that were evolving as the industry evolved. Having that expertise in-house, having those folks, I think really helps have that unified platform from whether it's packaging, whether it's the client development, all that together helps us deliver.
Tomas Bacik:
Excellent. Speaking of delivery, there's been a lot of talks at the conference about edge computing utilization. I want to ask, how do you approach the delivery model? How do you combine these centralized cloud, caching services and edge computing? Do you utilize any edge computing capabilities?
Rob Collins:
We do. Over the last nine years that I've been doing this, there was the maturation of the CDN delivery model. A lot of the interesting stuff is happening on the edge now, and as it's specific to STARZ, recently we've matured our analytics capability models, doing the things of what is the user doing. That's the thing that you find with applications on the edge and personalizing and so forth. It's a later capability than we've had, but things have been maturing, we're working a lot more these days.
Tomas Bacik:
That makes perfect sense. That brings us to CDNs obviously, because edge computing is closely tied to delivery and as today's provided by CDN vendors, and I know you have a multi-CDN setup at STARZ and over the years you work in multiple CDNs. When you choose a new CDN, what would you say are the main criteria you look at now?
Rob Collins:
Main criteria I think has got to be uptime. There's an uptime, those we built in STARZ. We never want somebody to sit down and want to watch STARZ. We're a premium service, they're paying us to watch, we want them to be able to watch, uptime is always central to that. Performance, of course, we've got close to 20 million subscribers, geographically diverse, all the United States, different countries and so forth. Want to have that low latency and so forth. And I think what's really important for CDNs as we've gone over the years, just having that good partnership of just people who understand our business, people we can talk to, people we can collaborate with for some of these new initiatives. And just as our business progresses and saying, "We've got a big premiere coming up, let's make sure everything's good."
Tomas Bacik:
Have any of those criteria became more or less important in the last couple of years in your view, based on the experience you've gained?
Rob Collins:
Yeah, I would say from my perspective, that partnership is just really important. Again, because of the nature of our business, there's people are waiting at midnight to watch one of our big premieres. We go from relatively low to all of a sudden everybody's logged on at the same time. We need to have that partner be aware of that and be able to handle it. And again, some of our new initiatives, just being able to communicate and say, "Here's where we're going with the business, what can you do to help us? How can we collaborate on this?"
Tomas Bacik:
Thank you very much. Thank you. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the show.
Rob Collins:
Thanks, Tom.
Tomas Bacik:
We're at the StreamTV Show in Denver and we hope to see you around. Thank you.