Live HLS Streaming from Wowza to Highwinds CDN

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi All,

I’ve been talking to Highwinds CDN to do final delivery of our HLS streams to end users. Currently we are using Wowza 3.0 to transrate and deliver our HLS streams to end users. All is working well with this but we are ramping up our viewers and are looking at plans to scale up delivery. Highwinds quoted a really good rate which is cheaper than running a bunch of edge servers so I’m trying to see if there is a way to use Wowza as the origin server and Highwinds are the edge server.

After speaking with Highwinds tech support they sent over this information: “The origin must generate “clean” manifests that do not interfere with the CDN’s ability to cache objects for standard HTTP delivery. Some origins (such as the Wowza Media Server) are known to inject data into the manifest that disrupts effective caching.” Does anyone know if there is a fix to make this work? Thanks in advance!

Sean

2

Wowza currently does not support being a caching origin. It is something we may add in the future.

Charlie

3

Take a look at the MediaCache AddOn. It is the method for scaling vod delivery.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-scale-video-on-demand-streaming-with-media-cache

Charlie

4

You will have to work with them about HLS output on their side. Some Wowza customers push to their CDN for RTMP distribution, but handle cupertinostreaming directly.

Richard

5

Trisha,

Take a look at this guide:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-a-wowza-server-as-an-http-caching-origin

Richard

6

Hi Charlie,

I was reading through this old thread from 2011, as I am seeking to do this same thing today. I’d like to have our Wowza server act as the caching origin for our CDN, Level 3, to deliver our HLS stream. Is this possible today? We’ve not been able to make it work. Thank you.

Trisha Denesevich

Cornell University

7

Origin pull works perfectly with both Amazon Cloudfront, Highwinds and maxcdn

8

Hi Charlie and Sean

We are looking at a similar situation; we would operate Wowza as a origin, and have edges distributing from it, using HLS (VOD only).

My expectation is, we transcode and segment the content, and the edges could quite easily cache HLS segments.

Do you have more information on how Wowza modifies manifests?

Thanks

Nick

9

We are Highwinds customers and were able to get our Flash (HDS) stream working through the CDN, but we are not able to get the iOS (HLS) streams to work on the CDN. We had to temporarily move to Flash Media Server, but we need to take advantage of the MPEG-TS feature in wowza, and have Highwinds origin pull that content. Has anyone found a way to do this, or does anyone have Highwinds working with iOS streams?