For Filippa Hasselström and the team behind Sye, joining Amazon was never the finish line. What started as a technical collaboration with Amazon became the foundation for technology’s global expansion. Today, their technology powers some of the world's largest live sports broadcasts on Prime Video, helping deliver faster, higher-quality experiences to millions of customers.
Their journey reflects what still building looks like in practice: continuing to innovate, scaling up those ideas globally, and serving as an economic multiplier for the communities where they first began.
Innovation starts with a question
When a small team of engineers in Stockholm began tackling one of live streaming's toughest technical problems, they weren't trying to transform the global entertainment industry. They were focused on one simple question: how could live streaming be as immediate as traditional television?
The story began in Stockholm in 2015, where Swedish technology company Net Insight began developing Sye to solve one of live streaming's biggest challenges: latency. For sports fans, watching live online had long meant accepting an unavoidable trade-off: convenience at the expense of immediacy. Goals appeared on social media before they happened on screen, notifications spoiled key moments, and cheers from nearby fans arrived seconds before the action did.
Filippa Hasselström, now Director of Live Streaming at Prime Video, joined the initiative in 2016, bringing years of experience in live streaming to help turn that technical challenge into a solution. "I'd been working in the live streaming space for most of my career. Meeting a team in Sweden solving problems the industry hadn't solved before was incredibly inspiring. There was no doubt I wanted to be part of that journey."
The team's ambition wasn't simply to improve an existing product. It was to rethink how live streaming should work. That shared belief was also what first connected Sye with Amazon. The relationship began not with a business transaction, but with engineers on both sides recognising they were trying to solve the same challenge.
Today, that relationship has evolved far beyond a business transaction: the resulting technology now powers Prime Video´s biggest global sport broadcasts, including Thursday Night Football, the NBA, UEFA Champions League, and the Premier League, for millions of fans worldwide.
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From breakthough innovation to global scale
For a small engineering team, building breakthrough technology is only one part of the challenge. Getting that technology deployed at global scale is another.
Working alongside Amazon allowed the Stockholm team to continue improving the technology while adapting it to support millions of viewers, thousand of device configurations and some of the world´s biggest live sporting events.
Looking back, Filippa says the collaboration arrived at exactly the right moment. "The collaboration with Amazon came at the right time. It was an opportunity to work with a customer who had the scale and experience to implement and grow a solution such as ours."
Before joining Amazon, most of Sye's customers were based in Sweden. Today, the technology powers some of Prime Video's biggest live broadcasts, reaching audiences in more than 220 countries and territories.
Operating at that scale also accelerated innovation. Every new deployment brought increasingly complex engineering challenges, allowing the team to continuously refine the technology, improve reliability and optimise the viewing experience across a growing range of devices and network conditions.
Creating impact beyond the product
The impact extended well beyond the technology itself. Following the acquisition and integration into Prime Video, the original engineering team in Stockholm remained together and continued to grow, doubling in size as new engineering challenges emerged.
That growth also created new career opportunities. The organisation expanded beyond engineering roles, adding managers, product managers and technical program managers, while growing beyond Stockholm into hubs such as London and Seattle.
She views this expansion as a testament to the team´s evolution: "I'm proud to say that the majority of the engineers that came through the acquisition are still with the team. The team in Stockholm, the original team, has grown."
The team's influence has also extended beyond Amazon. Today, it collaborates with universities, hosts interns and works with researchers on challenges such as network congestion in global-scale streaming, creating stronger links between industry and academia while helping develop the next generation of engineers.
For Europe, stories like Sye's demonstrate that scaling innovation is about far more than commercial success. It is about enabling breakthrough technologies to reach global markets while strengthening local engineering talent, creating high-skilled jobs and building lasting innovation ecosystems.
More than a decade after Sye was first developed in Stockholm, the original team is still solving complex problems, still growing and still building, showing that, for innovative companies, the most impactful chapter often begins after the acquisition.
