Wowza Announces Content Delivery Through Amazon Web Services
Wowza Media Server customers can now leverage Amazon CloudFront content delivery network for high-speed media streaming over wide geographical areas
EVERGREEN, Colo. – September 11, 2013 – Wowza Media Systems, LLC, provider of Simply Powerful Streaming™ media server software, today announced that customers can leverage Amazon CloudFront from Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Wowza Media Server. With this, customers can now efficiently stream audio and video content globally to any screen without contracts, monthly commitments or upfront fees.
Wowza-originated media streams can be delivered at a global scale through Amazon CloudFront’s world-wide HTTP caching network, allowing customers to reduce their total cost of ownership by leveraging the low-cost, pay-as-you-go pricing model from AWS. This new and simpler setup allows customers to take advantage of Wowza Media Server’s support for a wide variety of formats while obtaining the high levels of delivery performance needed for maintaining a quality playback experience for viewers.
“Many of our customers are already using Wowza Media Server running on Amazon EC2 to distribute media,” said Chris Knowlton, Vice President of product management at Wowza. “By working closely with AWS to support Amazon CloudFront, we are now able to give customers the ability to scale and improve playback experiences for their audience without the higher costs and management requirements of building out their own origin-edge network. Wowza using Amazon CloudFront is do-it-yourself media streaming at its very best.”
Through a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) arrangement, the new solution allows new and existing Wowza and AWS customers to combine the benefits of Wowza Media Server and its broad array of Wowza AddOns with the reliability, scalability, low latency and cost-efficiency of Amazon CloudFront. The streamlined setup and management system will make it faster and easier for Wowza users to deliver multiple streaming formats, including Apple® HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Adobe® HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS), Microsoft® Smooth Streaming and MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH).
“Through our work with Wowza we are able to offer our customers another option for streaming their audio and video media to desktops and devices using Amazon CloudFront, the AWS global content delivery service,” said Kalyanaraman Prasad, Vice President, AWS Edge Services. “Enabling more choice and flexibility for our customers is important to AWS and we’re excited to continue working closely with Wowza to enable this.”
With Amazon CloudFront, streaming content is automatically routed to the optimal edge location to deliver the best possible performance. Its pay-per-use model ensures that Wowza licensees will only pay for content that is actually streamed. Wowza customers will be able to distribute both live streams and on-demand content using Amazon CloudFront.
A small number of customers have been previewing this combination for about six months. “We stream at least 3,000 hours of live programming each year, from the State Legislature to a myriad of sporting events, delivering over 500 GB of content per day to end users during our busy season,” said Shane Miner, IT Manager at Nebraska Education Telecommunications (NET). “We were already using Wowza Media Server and Amazon EC2 to transcode and deliver HTTP streams to desktops, iPhones and Android devices. Since we began using Amazon CloudFront, we’ve seen at least a 25% reduction in our delivery costs. The solution has been highly reliable for us, allowing us to largely ‘set it and forget it,’ knowing that our capacity can expand almost instantly when needed with no impact on our internal network or resources.”
Wowza Media Server delivery using Amazon CloudFront is available through the AWS Marketplace. To get started with using Wowza Media Server and Amazon CloudFront please visit https://www.wowza.com/docs/amazon.
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About Wowza Media Systems
Wowza Media Systems, LLC (www.wowza.com) engages hundreds of millions of viewers by delivering the highest quality streaming media to any Internet-connected device. Its core product, Wowza Media Server, improves productivity among thousands of organizations by simplifying the workflow of online video delivery. To date, more than 150,000 licensees across the globe have placed their trust in Wowza. Wowza is privately held, with offices in Evergreen, Colorado, and Mountain View, California.