Video streaming for a multi-national company

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi,

We are looking at implementing Wowza into our company as we have requirements to be able to offer live broadcasts to a large number of users based all over the world. It would be handy to have some advice of this matter and any recommendations that you may suggest. To give you an overview of what we are trying to achieve;

As with every company we have issues with bandwidth, especially when we have a large number of users (500+) in offices all needing to watch the same live stream, this can bring down the WAN. We are deploying multicast across our network so we can multicast the single stream out, however this is not a quick task.

My questions at the moment are;

  • Does Wowza support streaming to other Wowza servers?

For example. Say London has 500 users - we deploy a Wowza server locally to distribute the stream to everyone in London. We also have 500 users in Manchester, we don’t want 500 separate streams being pushed to those users as it’ll destroy the network. Can we deploy a local Wowza server in Manchester as well and stream a single stream to that?

  • If you do deploy multiple Wowza servers, how does your desktop client know which Wowza server to pull the stream from?

  • Are you able to customise the quality of the stream that is being pushed from Wowza?

Thanks…

2

Hello,

Wowza Streaming Engine supports server-to-server streaming using an origin/edge topography. So in the example you mentioned, a single stream or a few streams (if using Adaptive Bit Rate) would be created between the origin and edge servers, then users would connect to the server that is closest to their location. You may want to reference the following article for more information.

You also have the option of pushing a stream from one server to a CDN (Content Delivery Network), this is typically the most scalable option as CDN networks are robust and geographically diverse.

Streams can be deployed using Adaptive Bit Rate ABR which will select the appropriate quality of stream based on the users bandwidth to the Wowza server.

We also offer Wowza Cloud, with flexible usage package or you can use an Amazon EC2 AMI to run a cloud based version of Wowza Streaming Engine. Both cloud options have the ability to stream to content delivery networks as well.

Best regards,

Andrew