Live Stream startup time

Wowza Video (Formerly Streaming Cloud)
1

Using the API I’m able to start and stop the Live Streams on WSC for transcoding a single bitrate stream pushed from WSE. The issue is that it seems like starting up a transcoder takes in excess of a minute, and there’s no active way to know when it’s ready other than to poll the /state API. I don’t have a strict schedule, so using those to turn the transcoders on/off isn’t really practical. I’m concerned that the startup time is so long, since it means I have to figure out how to monitor for that and keep my user waiting for an indeterminate amount of time before they or their viewers can see the stream.

I guess my questions are:

  1. Is there any reasonable expectation for how long it will/should take for a livestream/transcoder to start up?

  2. Is there a plan/roadmap for improving the current startup time, or is this what to expect?

  3. Are there any best-practices for “on-demand” streaming through WSC, wrt managing the viewer and producer experience for knowing if/when things will be flowing properly?

2

Hello,

I wanted to point out to you that Wowza Streaming Engine 4.4.0 has a new option that enables Wowza Streaming Engine to automatically start the Wowza Streaming Cloud service when you create a Wowza Streaming Cloud stream target. This option starts the Wowza Streaming Cloud transcoder immediately and publishes the source stream. For more information, see How to send a live stream to Wowza Streaming Cloud.

See responses to your questions below:

  1. Is there any reasonable expectation for how long it will/should take for a livestream/transcoder to start up?

For the live stream instance to start up in the Wowza Cloud interface we state that it could take a few minutes. The time you have been seeing is about average 60-90 seconds.

  1. Is there a plan/roadmap for improving the current startup time, or is this what to expect?

We are looking to try and improve that startup time of the instance, however, there is not time frame assigned to that modification. In the meantime, you might consider using passthrough since you are using the Wowza Streaming Engine. They spin up much faster.

  1. Are there any best-practices for “on-demand” streaming through WSC, wrt managing the viewer and producer experience for knowing if/when things will be flowing properly?

For more on-demand streaming, the passthrough option is the quickest and best option.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Mac

3

Thanks Mac,

Yeah, I was planning to use the “auto start” option on the stream targets, but that still leaves a fairly long, indeterminate amount of time before the stream is live, so it means we have to poll for that status to manage the process. It saves us the one call to start the live stream on the WSC side, but that’s it.

Wrt the passthrough option, how does that differ from not using a live stream at all, and just going directly to a CDN stream target? I’m a bit confused as to why I’d use passthrough option and pay for compute cycles to push the bits if I’ve already transcoded everything. That said, the link you provided seems to back that up, since it sets up the WSE side to go to the CDN. In that case is the passthrough live stream just an easier way to configure the workflow?

4

Hello,

The benefits to using the passthrough option is that you remove the delay for startup and gain access to the CDN directly. Not knowing your workflow, the only limitation here is your hardware and network to send transcoded streams directly. There is very little cost to access the CDN through the Wowza Cloud platform. See the pricing for passthrough here.

I hope this helps.

Mac