I have 6 Wowza servers and am debating whether I should add 5 more, or go with a CDN delivery. We stream VOD exclusively, 700 files in 4 qualities / with bitrate switching over RTMP. We utilize token authentication and SSL something (not sure, I didn’t set it up). They are all edge servers pulling from an HTTP source and deliver 30-40TB of data/month. Current server costs are ~$2500/month which does well for 99.9% of our users, but we would like to do better and reach all of them, without sacrificing security. Looking at Amazon Cloudfront or Rackspace I could get HTTP CDN streaming for ~$3500/month so really a negligible change considering we are looking at adding more servers which would probably end up being more per month, but with the advantage of being a fixed cost.
I really thought Akamai offered RTMP edge but they said they do not, but that they handle security with:
Token Authentication: prevents link sharing, embed a token in the url and protect users passing links
Player Verification: prevents users from taking links and embedding stream in an unauthorized player
Media Encryption: encrypts the stream from the Akamai edge server to the browser, decrypts once the stream is played
Content Targeting: white list/black list IP’s (users from NA can watch, anyone outside of NA is not authorized)
How does this compare with the RTMP security? Currently users cannot download our videos using any of the free rippers, but they used to when we did use HTTP, but we had not added those previously mentioned things. I don’t mind managing my own servers, but I also don’t need to recreate the wheel and make my own CDN if someone else is already doing it bigger / better and for near the same cost. I understand Wowza is partnering with Mirror-Image, but I haven’t been able to get anyone on the phone from sales to find out if it is RTMP, or HTTP only.
Thoughts?