5stream: The clarinet masterclass that levelled sport's broadcast playing field

Sixteen years on, that scrappy solution has become 5stream, a Brunswick based broadcast technology company whose cloud production platform underpins live coverage for the AFL, Cricket Australia, NBL, the ABC and international sport in more than 60 countries. What began as a fix for one small audience is now closing the broadcast gap for every sport and organisation that could never previously afford a seat at the table.

5stream provides live streaming and broadcast software that lets anyone create a professional, affordable live broadcast delivering camera switching, remote production and zero-latency, end-to-end workflows backed by 24/7 support. At the centre of the offering is Cloudmix, the company's flagship SaaS platform: a browser-based broadcast production tool that lets users switch cameras, mix video and audio, add graphics and output a finished programme to multiple destinations, all with sub-second latency and full broadcast quality. Today a team of 14, all based in Victoria, supports that global client base.

"We make our clients' lives better. We make streaming easier," says Tim Kelly, 5stream co-founder and CEO. "Teamwork makes the stream work."

Three musicians and a clarinet masterclass

Founders Tim Kelly, Aidan Barrett and Paul Evans met within Melbourne's performing arts scene. In 2010, the trio was engaged to live stream a clarinet masterclass with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, building the complete end-to-end workflow themselves, with cameras, microphones, cabling, vision switching, audio mixing, encoding and a website to deliver the stream. There were, in the founders' own words, "so many moving parts", and a complicated process for the time, but the response from viewers made the effort worthwhile.

From there, the founders set out to simplify how people could "go live," so that communities around the world could broadcast their interests at professional quality. What began in musical niches, which 5stream still services today, has since branched into major events, emergency broadcasting and sport, with the company's "behind the scenes" technology now woven into broadcasts audiences watch on TV and online every week.

An uneven playing field

Delivering a professional broadcast has traditionally required a massive spend on complex technology and infrastructure, a model that worked for Tier One sports with multimilliondollar rights deals, but left tier two and three sports on the sidelines, unable to build a national or international profile.

5stream set out to change that. By taking an asset-light approach and capitalising on advances in camera and hardware quality, the company brought elite-level streaming within reach of every sport and live-event producer. Its in-house technology removes reliance on third-party software connections, giving users a single, simple, cloud-based platform to switch camera angles, manage scores and graphics, integrate commentary and run commercial overlays, all while drastically reducing the onsite personnel and expenditure a rights holder would otherwise need. As pioneers of Australia's mass broadcast market, 5stream helped turn single "match of the week" streams into full-league coverage across football, AFL, NBL1, cricket and beyond.

Cloudmix: broadcast production in a browser

Cloudmix is a browser based broadcast production platform built to make professional broadcast technology more accessible, flexible and scalable than traditional on-site hardware setups. Individual camera feeds stream into the cloud, and from a standard web browser users can switch cameras, mix and composite video, add graphics, mix audio and output a finished programme to multiple destinations, all with sub-second latency and full broadcast quality. Beyond the core switch, Cloudmix supports remote co-streamers, in-platform clipping, recording and highlighting, and multiple ingest and backup paths for broadcast-quality resilience, with data pipelines running alongside the audio and video, built AI-ready for what comes next.

Two further pillars round out the offering. Zeti, launched in conjunction with Telstra and the AFL, delivers in-venue commentary to fans' own smartphones with 0.15-second end-to-end latency, perfectly synced to the live action. LiveHQ, 5Stream's managed services arm based in Brunswick, provides 24/7 broadcast feed management, remote production and monitoring, regularly overseeing more than 50 high-profile simultaneous broadcasts at once.

Trusted with the highest-profile content

5stream's client list speaks to the trust it has built: Kick, international sporting federations under NDA and the Berlin Philharmonic, alongside major partnerships with Cricket Australia, the AFL, NBL1 and Australian production companies. Sportradar, the $8 billion NASDAQ-listed wagering and sports data company, uses Cloudmix's deep API integration to automate broadcast workflows and scale live coverage to TV, websites and bookmaker platforms across more than 60 countries and 1,200 venues.

The numbers tell the story of reach. National Premier League match coverage for Football NSW has grown more than tenfold since 5stream pioneered mass broadcasting in 2017. More than 1,700 NBL1 basketball games are broadcast each season via Cloudmix, with peak nights involving over 100 live camera feeds from venues across Australia, and the league fast approaching 50 million minutes watched per season. 5stream joined the AFL, Channel 7, Fox Sports and Dan Does Footy to deliver The Ultimate Footy Watchalong series, attracting more than 250,000 live viewers and generating over ten million social video views. And when Gymnastics Australia wanted to replicate AppleTV's full-iPhone broadcast of a 2026 Major League Soccer match, 5stream helped bring that same cutting-edge approach to the 2026 Gymnastics National Championships, a lightly funded Olympic sport suddenly broadcasting like a major league – directly from iPhones.

The impact reaches beyond sport, too. During COVID-19 lockdowns, Melbourne Digital Concert Hall used 5stream to deliver 233 live-streamed concerts in nine months, generating $1,000,000 in income for musicians and arts workers when venues were closed. Victorian Opera's "Access All Areas" education programme, produced and streamed with 5stream, has reached almost 200 schools and thousands of students over five consecutive years. Each year since 2017, the New Year’s Eve fireworks streamed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has used Cloudmix as its production platform.

ASTN's role

5stream connected with ASTN just before the Paris Olympics and was invited to join ASTN's international trade mission to Paris, Switzerland and Belgium, a trip that opened direct access to key European decision makers, federations and potential partners, and helped accelerate the company's conversations in those markets. ASTN has since supported 5stream's attendance at the PEAK conference and its exhibition at SportNXT, raising the company's profile within the Australian and international sportstech community.

"ASTN has been a practical and valuable partner," Kelly says. "The international trade mission and support to attend key conferences opened doors we wouldn't have reached as quickly on our own. Victoria's sportstech community is collaborative and outward looking, and that environment has helped us continue growing from a Melbourne-based team into a company serving clients in more than 60 countries."

What's next

Over the next one to three years, 5Ssream's goal is to make Cloudmix the "Canva" of live video production, an accessible, enterprise-grade broadcast tool usable by anyone, regardless of skill level. That would put the same high-quality broadcast tools once reserved for large broadcasters with specialist crews and expensive on-site hardware into the hands of content creators, smaller organisations and production teams everywhere.

The company plans to scale Cloudmix across more sports leagues, arts organisations and hybrid events in Australia and internationally, deepening partnerships with existing clients including AFL, NBL1, Cricket Australia and major performing arts companies. Product development will focus on further automation, more intuitive interfaces, API-driven workflows and tighter integration of graphics, remote commentary and clipping tools, alongside continued investment in low-latency delivery, expanded managed services, and selective partnerships or funding to accelerate growth. Continued ASTN support, targeted international market access, introductions to rights holders and federations, and visibility within Victoria's sportstech ecosystem, is something 5Stream sees as valuable as it scales.

Find out more

For more information on 5stream visit https://5stream.com