# A dummy's guide to creating a live-streaming platform... with Wordpress **URL:** \ **Category:** Wowza Streaming Engine\ **Created:** [March 24, 2015, 9:48pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678 "2015-03-24T21:48:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Schuyler\_Davis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f475e1/32.png) [@Schuyler\_Davis](https://community.wowza.com/u/Schuyler_Davis)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2015, 9:48pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/1 "2015-03-24T21:48:47Z")
What’s up everyone. I spent quite a bit of time developing my live streaming platform and I thought I’d share what I’ve learned. Why you ask? Well because I spent hours and hours researching this stuff - I must have Googled every possible term, Wordpress plugin, custom module out there… I’m not even kidding! I think my blood-pressure is permanently higher because of all this, and I’m most likely scarred for life. I should also mention a lot of what I learned simply didn’t exist before, at least not publicly or inexpensively. So I either had to code it myself, bootstrap things together, or bug Wowza support and consultants. My only hope is that I can save someone from some of the pain I endured through all this - and as a way to contribute back and help make this community even more awesome. I seriously wish I had all this when I started, so I’m going to do the “nice” (read: crazy) thing and do it myself. Seems like a stupid thing to do seeing as all this is info you literally have to pay for. Well stupid sounds right up my alley! Let’s do it! Oh yeah, I should also mention that my methods are a bit unorthodox. There is probably a way better way to do things. So, **use at your own risk.** It’s also going to be long, boring, and confusing. Enjoy. **Let’s start at the beginning…** For some ungodly and idiotic reason I decided to use Wordpress as my content management system. So if you are familiar with Wordpress like I was, not good at coding like I am, you’re probably feeling like you should develop your platform on Wordpress. Makes sense, right? Well I am just going to warn you that Wordpress is definitely NOT made for a project such as this. That much should be obvious. You’re going to have to do a lot of hacking, testing, tweaking, bootstrapping, and hardcore headache medication to get things working. And you’ll end up with a mess of things that might even barely work! If you’re good with all that, feel free to use some of my tips. I should also mention that I am super poor so I couldn’t just hire anyone (which is what I’d highly recommend you do if you are trying to create your own platform. Seriously, for the love of god and all that is good in this world, email Wowza support and ask for their consultant list). So a lot of these resources you can use to create your platform up until the point to where you’re nearing launch. After that, you’re going to have to come up with the money to ignite the fuse. Good? Good. Ok. **Let’s do a little bit of pre-emptive checking.** **You should know what kind of platform you want to make.** - Is it just going to be you streaming? - Is it going to be a video conferencing service? - Are you going to let other people stream? - Are you going to charge them, or have it be free and monetize another way? - Ejabberd - IRCv3 - Firechat / Firebase ---
**Author:** ![Dimo\_Hristov](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/8dc957/32.png) [@Dimo\_Hristov](https://community.wowza.com/u/Dimo_Hristov)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2015, 11:38am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/2 "2015-04-10T11:38:10Z")
This one is very helpfull topcic for people who just want to start a streaming website. I am one of these people and i appreciates your post and will to help. I read very carefully the whole post i found some solutions for me, but i dont want to use wordpress anyway. however i just want to know wich plugin do you use for the live broadcast? i tried videwhisper months ago and i didn’t like it cuz it is so boring and not customizable as i needed to be. If you need some help too, i am always open to help. Anyway, thank you for your great post. ---
**Author:** ![Dope\_Labs](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7ea924/32.png) [@Dope\_Labs](https://community.wowza.com/u/Dope_Labs)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2015, 6:20pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/3 "2015-04-26T18:20:17Z")
i too have recently modified a wordpress for livestreaming. i modified the videotube theme which already supports user channels, static uploads, iframes, and urls to yt/vimeo/etc. i also added support for ‘pro’ members, which adds transcoding, multicasting to twitch or youtube livestreaming or any rtmp livestreaming service, and also have the ability to create live events, streams, and go live via the websites youtube account. the chat was pretty easy as you can use any irc network and any web irc client… but since i was already running my own ircd i used that. stream protection came in the form of unique stream names/keys which were auto generated, like the way [twitch.tv](http://twitch.tv) does it… and just used aliasmap.play to hide the real stream name. added items to the dashboard which have record start and stop buttons which send get requests to the livestreamrecord module, start and stop buttons for each of the multicast publish points, etc. files are stored on the server in a separate directory created for each user, and can only be downloaded or accessed if the user is logged in. there is also a button to export the video to youtube or export just the audio to soundcloud. jwplayer was also my choice for players as it has native support for rtmp and hls using a fallback method between flash and html5. mostly it was all just a proof of concept… and im not entirely sure its all still working 100% because i used the same site to dev a few other things like timeline comments for the videos (soundcloud style) =] ---
**Author:** ![Schuyler\_Davis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f475e1/32.png) [@Schuyler\_Davis](https://community.wowza.com/u/Schuyler_Davis)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2015, 5:47am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/4 "2015-04-15T05:47:46Z")
> This one is very helpfull topcic for people who just want to start a streaming website. I am one of these people and i appreciates your post and will to help. > > I read very carefully the whole post i found some solutions for me, but i dont want to use wordpress anyway. however i just want to know wich plugin do you use for the live broadcast? i tried videwhisper months ago and i didn’t like it cuz it is so boring and not customizable as i needed to be. > > If you need some help too, i am always open to help. > > Anyway, thank you for your great post. Hey alloces. I’m glad you found this helpful. I’ve actually changed a lot of things but that basic setup will work. Wordpress was not meant to be used this way, but one of the perks is that it’s really good at managing users and the content. Anyway as for what plugin I use, the short answer is… none! The way it’s set up is to give each person their own page, only they can edit and only they can broadcast to. The basics of that setup are explained above. I think you meant what encoder I use? Well there a huge number of encoders available but my personal favorite is Open Broadcaster Software. It’s free & open source, supports multiple scenes and even chroma keys. But you can go with whatever you want as the setup I described is encoder agnostic. Once you embed JW player with the correct URL, you can broadcast to it via your encoder. When you get into it and eventually want to support multiple protocols, such as streaming or viewing to an Ipad or something, JW player can do that too. It will just take a change in the code to make JW recognize what protocol the Wowza Engine is broadcasting. ---
**Author:** ![Schuyler\_Davis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f475e1/32.png) [@Schuyler\_Davis](https://community.wowza.com/u/Schuyler_Davis)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2015, 7:06pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/5 "2015-05-12T19:06:23Z")
> i too have recently modified a wordpress for livestreaming. i modified the videotube theme which already supports user channels, static uploads, iframes, and urls to yt/vimeo/etc. i also added support for ‘pro’ members, which adds transcoding, multicasting to twitch or youtube livestreaming or any rtmp livestreaming service, and also have the ability to create live events, streams, and go live via the websites youtube account. the chat was pretty easy as you can use any irc network and any web irc client… but since i was already running my own ircd i used that. stream protection came in the form of unique stream names/keys which were auto generated, like the way [twitch.tv](http://twitch.tv) does it… and just used aliasmap.play to hide the real stream name. added items to the dashboard which have record start and stop buttons which send get requests to the livestreamrecord module, start and stop buttons for each of the multicast publish points, etc. files are stored on the server in a separate directory created for each user, and can only be downloaded or accessed if the user is logged in. there is also a button to export the video to youtube or export just the audio to soundcloud. jwplayer was also my choice for players as it has native support for rtmp and hls using a fallback method between flash and html5. > > mostly it was all just a proof of concept… and im not entirely sure its all still working 100% because i used the same site to dev a few other things like timeline comments for the videos (soundcloud style) =] Sorry for the late response, I haven’t checked here in a while. And wow, I commend you for not only using Wordpress but for achieving all those cool features. I for one just went through a lot of that and can say that it’s no easy task to set up a live-streaming platform, but also hacking Wordpress into one on top of it. I ended up going with IRCd as well and it wasn’t so difficult, my biggest problem was finding support for problems I couldn’t solve. Couple questions for you if you don’t mind: - Why did you use aliasmap to hide the stream name if you’re using secure tokens? Just an added layer of security? - You mention storing files for each person in a directory on the web-server - why not harness something like S3? - You also mentioned using IRC, and I am assuming that each “channel” will get their own IRC channel as well. If this is the case, how did you achieve registering channel names (or setting the correct owner as the IRC channel “founder”)? - What IRCd services are you using? ---
**Author:** ![zachary\_crear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a5b964/32.png) [@zachary\_crear](https://community.wowza.com/u/zachary_crear)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2017, 8:22am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/6 "2017-03-13T08:22:54Z")
I’m about to break ground on this exact project (with the help of experienced wordpress php programmers and hosting techs), but prior to that I sourced a quote from a private agency. They quoted Backend ONLY at $325,000…Why given your scalable explanation and set up would their figures be so astronomically high? Your model seems to include everything I would need to construct a scalable TWITCH, correct? What am I missing? - I explained the need to support multi-user live streaming events to the extent Twitch does ---
**Author:** ![Schuyler\_Davis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f475e1/32.png) [@Schuyler\_Davis](https://community.wowza.com/u/Schuyler_Davis)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2017, 1:45pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/7 "2017-03-13T13:45:39Z")
I don’t really see that price being justified. You may spend that much in a year to get the entire business going, including your own servers / CDN, bandwidth, and paying all your technicians to keep things updated. I’d imagine a fair bit of other business related expenses as well such as marketing & PR, live-chat and servers, and what not. But $325k just to build the website? You probably wouldn’t even spend that much on bandwidth for a long time, which I’d say is the most expensive thing regarding this type of project. Of course I do not know exactly what their offer entails. ---
**Author:** ![Phil\_Burk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f07891/32.png) [@Phil\_Burk](https://community.wowza.com/u/Phil_Burk)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2017, 12:56pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/8 "2017-03-23T12:56:42Z")
@Schuyler Davis I have a similar project that I am recruiting for at this time. If you are willing to discuss your experience and ability to assist, I would be willing to discuss owner shares in the company. Please let me know how I can contact you if you would like to discuss this further. ---
**Author:** ![Schuyler\_Davis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f475e1/32.png) [@Schuyler\_Davis](https://community.wowza.com/u/Schuyler_Davis)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 6:52am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/9 "2017-03-25T06:52:47Z")
Hello @Phil Burk, I’d be delighted to talk about your project. I can’t find how to send you a message on here, but you can send me an email: wowza [at] [broadcasterfm.com](http://broadcasterfm.com) ---
**Author:** ![Joseph\_Padilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a587f6/32.png) [@Joseph\_Padilla](https://community.wowza.com/u/Joseph_Padilla)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2018, 8:34pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/10 "2018-11-07T20:34:32Z")
Hi Schuylerm, do you have a email I could reach out to you? ---
**Author:** ![Alkis\_Kastrisios](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4bbf92/32.png) [@Alkis\_Kastrisios](https://community.wowza.com/u/Alkis_Kastrisios)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2019, 3:46pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/11 "2019-05-30T15:46:13Z")
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience! You made my day with this: “And you know, if you’re going to be setting up a live-streaming platform you may as well familiarize yourself with the technology. You poor bastard, I feel sorry for you already.” ---
**Author:** ![Rose\_Power-Wowza\_Com](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.wowza.com/rose_power-wowza_com/32/431_2.png) [@Rose\_Power-Wowza\_Com](https://community.wowza.com/u/Rose_Power-Wowza_Com)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2019, 4:18pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/a-dummys-guide-to-creating-a-live-streaming-platform-with-wordpress/44678/12 "2019-05-30T16:18:15Z")
There’s just a “few” acronyms to learn. haha . Thanks for sharing this tutorial in our forums @Alkis Kastrisios- it’s great to have contributions like this.