Hi there,
Right now when we do the Zoom/Wowza integration we have about a 8-second delay. Is there any other Wowza product or set-up that would reduce that?
What are our options for zero/near-zero latency one to many livestreaming?
Thank you,
Jill
Hi Jill,
Because the streaming protocol that Zoom uses is RTMP and Wowza converts this to HLS, there will always be some processing/transcoding time involved. RTMP is an outdated protocol for playback whereas HLS is supported by most devices in today’s world. Having said that, HLS is great, but requires a certain amount of video chunks before playback will take place and actually 8 seconds is quite good! (It can average 30 seconds.
But, to answer your question, in order to reduce that and get closer to real-time, your option would be stop sending your stream from Zoom to Wowza, and instead access your camera on your desktop or laptop using the WebRTC streaming protocol. That is a real time streaming protocol delivering to your viewers in 0.5 seconds on average.
In Wowza Streaming Cloud, we only support WebRTC in and you’d still need to convert it to HLS and have some latency which you are trying to avoid.
In Wowza Streaming Engine though, we do support webrtc in and webrtc out for playback, so this would be very fast distribution to your viewers.
May I ask how many viewers you would expect on average? WebRTC broadcast to WebRTC playback doesn’t scale well for thousands of viewers as the quality of the stream will start to suffer, but works very well for say a 150 viewers.