How Nasdaq Scaled Financial Fair Disclosure Streaming with id3as & Norsk

The Customer

Nasdaq uses live video to meet one of the most demanding regulatory obligations in financial services: fair disclosure to investors. Every earnings call, investor briefing, and market-moving announcement has to reach the market simultaneously and reliably — tens of thousands of times a year.

The Challenge

When Nasdaq first went looking for a technology refresh, the market offered plenty of “source in, ladder out” solutions: send a feed from the venue, encode it into a bitrate ladder, and push it to CDNs. On paper, that matched the requirement. In practice, it didn’t come close to solving the actual problem.

Fair disclosure streaming isn’t really an encoding problem. It’s a compliance and reliability problem wrapped in an encoding problem. Nasdaq needed to:

• Meet a legal obligation not to disadvantage any investor by how a disclosure reaches them
• Maintain an ongoing relationship and feedback loop with the market, during and after each event
• Understand how each message landed and what impact it had
• Do all of the above flawlessly, tens of thousands of times a year, with minimal human intervention — even when a cloud provider, a network, or a single venue connection was having a bad day

At the volume Nasdaq operates, signal reliability from the event location was consistently the biggest point of failure. A network that tested fine the day before could behave very differently with thousands of people in the room. No off-the-shelf product was built to answer questions like: What’s the backup source, on a completely separate network, if the primary fails? What happens if the internet goes down entirely — can we still get audio out over the phone, laid over a branded static image? Can we patch in trailers and promotional content? Can we embed timecodes to keep the stream in sync with the slides and the precisely timed release of market-sensitive data?

That’s not a product you can buy off the shelf. High-end alternatives existed, but came with a steep price tag and a lengthy integration project of their own.

The Solution

Nasdaq partnered with id3as to build a purpose-fit streaming workflow around its actual business rules, rather than forcing its process to fit a generic encoding product. The resulting workflow handled:

• Automatic source failover — falling back to a secondary feed sent over an entirely different network if the primary source degraded or dropped
• Phone-based audio fallback — broadcasting audio over the phone, laid over a customer-specified static image, if the venue lost internet connectivity entirely
• Content patching — the ability to insert trailers and promotional videos into the stream
• Timecode embedding — keeping the live signal precisely synced with slides and the timed release of disclosure data

Because id3as built the workflow around Nasdaq’s own business logic rather than a generic template, id3as has been able to keep tailoring the solution as Nasdaq’s needs evolve.

The Results

• Webcast errors dropped sharply after the new workflow went live
• Monitoring capacity scaled without adding headcount — Nasdaq’s existing call centre could oversee a significantly larger number of live events than before
• A sustained competitive advantage — ongoing tailoring means the workflow keeps evolving with Nasdaq’s needs rather than locking them into a fixed, one-size-fits-all product

“When Amazon US East went down, we had most of our infrastructure running there. Some companies were down for days. We were down for around a second. None of our customers even noticed!”

— Simon Ball, Nasdaq

Why It Matters Beyond Nasdaq

The Nasdaq engagement is one of the clearest examples of the idea behind Norsk: the parts of a live-streaming workflow that actually differentiate a business — the failover logic, the fallback rules, the sync behaviour — are business logic, not video engineering. Norsk is built to let teams implement and evolve that logic directly, in a few dozen lines of code, using the languages they already work in — without having to become a media technology company to do it.