Several executives at NAB 2025 described a company called Hydrolix as “the most interesting thing happening in data right now”—and naturally, Faultline was suspicious. Pitched as a streaming data lake vendor, US-based Hydrolix is gaining serious traction by promising something of a fantasy for media operations—serving up real-time observability from the combination of video log data from multiple sources, at a fraction of the usual cost and at previously unfathomable scale. The elevator pitch is a 4x reduction in data retention costs, but we learn that this can reach 10x depending on the use case. At the helm is CEO and co-founder Marty Kagan, a CDN veteran with stints at Akamai, Cedexis, and Fastly. In many ways, Hydrolix is a…