In 2023, Damian and Martijn started building a streaming platform together. Not a concept — a real product, with real publishers, real content, and real infrastructure. Between them they had decades in and around the industry. They thought they knew what they were getting into.

They were wrong — but not in the way you'd expect. The technology worked. The content was there. What didn't work was everything around it.

When it came to monetising the platform, every ad network offered the same thing: programmatic. Audience segments. Demographic targeting. Behavioural profiles built on third-party data. There was no option to match ads to what was actually on screen. No platform offered it. And because independent streaming audiences are smaller and harder to profile than the walled gardens, the CPMs were painful — a fraction of what the content deserved.

They started solving the delivery problem in parallel. CDN costs were scaling aggressively with every new viewer — the economics that made independent streaming viable at small scale became brutal at growth. The answer was a distributed node network: bandwidth contributed by people around the world, routing streams at a fraction of centralised CDN rates. It worked.

And then something clicked. If you control the delivery infrastructure, you can also control how ads are delivered — and matched. Not to who's watching, but to what's on screen. Scene-level context, extracted at encoding, used to serve the right ad in the right moment. No cookies. No behavioural profiles. No third-party data.

Nobody was offering contextual advertising for independent streaming because nobody had built the infrastructure to do it properly. So they built it themselves. That's Popcorn.