Demo: Wowza Video

In this video, we’ll be walking through the Wowza Video platform, an integrated video solution designed to build scalable and reliable video applications for both live and on-demand workflows. 

Now, currently we’re on the homepage. You can access this by logging into video.wowza.com. On this page, you’ll see high level usage based statistics, such as hours viewed and streamed, viewer consumed bandwidth, transcoding time, and video storage. 

We’ll start by selecting Add Live Stream. We’ll want to name this appropriately, perhaps relating it to the specific event or the customer base. Then we’ll choose the location closest to where we’re broadcasting from; we have locations globally, which you can choose from. 

Next we’ll need to select your encoder. We have integrations with our own ecosystem of products, as well as partner integrations available, and we also have generic options for RTMP, RTSP, SRT, and UDP. Since we’re going to use OBS Studio as our encoder, we’ll select RTMP or even SRT, depending on the need. For billing, we’ll keep it pay as you go so fees incurred are use based. For type, we’ll leave it as adaptive bitrate, so multiple renditions are created for an HLS stream. We can also prioritize latency, lowering buffer size and segment duration. We’ll want the aspect ratio to be the same as our stream, ensuring the correct number of renditions are created. If we check, Save to Asset Management, we can ensure a recorded version of this live stream is saved and available to be restreamed or for viewing on demand, and if our stream has captions, we can define the type here. 

Next, we’ll choose the type of player used for our embed code, or on our hosted page, more options will be added in time. And if we’re using our own player, we can bypass all of these settings. We can make this player responsive or fixed width, add a countdown clock that appears before the live event, as well as a poster image, and we can even choose to add a logo to the player and drop it on a specific corner of the player screen. 

Next, we can decide if we want to use a hosted webpage. If we do, we can add a title, logo, description, and even social media icons to the page. I’ll add some information here, so you can see the results. 

Next, we can take the time to review all of our settings before finishing, which creates the live stream. 

From the overview page for the live stream, we can get the source connection information we need for the encoder. And if you wait a bit longer and do a refresh, we can also see the hosted page URL and the player embed code needed to show how the stream looks once it’s live. We can also use the playback URL within our own player to show the stream, but it won’t have any of the player configurations that we set up, like that countdown clock. 

Let’s get this primary server URL into an encoder, but before going to the encoder, let’s Start the Live Stream, so it’s ready to go. Now, as I said before, we’ll be using OBS Studio as the encoder. Under Settings, we can go to Stream, and here we’ll use the custom option under Service, and then paste in the server information. We use host Port 10,000, so we can append this with a colon. 

Okay, while that’s all we need to do to stream, if we really want to achieve lower latency, we do want to make a few other changes in OBS Studio. With an Audio of 48 kilohertz, and Video at 1080p, we’ll want the Output to use the mode advanced. Rate Control should be CBR, with a Bitrate of either 4,000 or 6,000, depending on the amount of motion in the live stream. The Keyframe Interval needs to be two seconds; CPU set to very fast. The Profile for 1080p purposes should be high, and we need to Tune for zero latency. This sets B-frames and scene cut to zero. Once we’re good to go, we can Start the stream. 

Okay, back in Wowza Video, we’ll see the stream has been started when we start seeing health information appear, such as the inbound and outbound bitrate. Eventually, we’ll see a thumbnail that changes every five seconds. 

As I mentioned before, we can view this live stream by using either the hosted page, embed code, or by using the playback URL in our own player. The hosted page and embed code are really just intended for customers who don’t have a website, or rather a web admin team, and are looking for a reliable way for viewers to access the live stream. 

The player has basic functionality, along with quality control options. For those using their own player, you can use the playback URL for HLS. You can leverage most players out there, but we’ll be using Flowplayer from try.flowplayer.com to test our playback. Your latency may change depending on what player you decide to use; I’ve noticed a six second latency here with Flowplayer.

Now, if you go back to Wowza Video, you can see under statistics that I’m the only one watching, with a current unique views of one. However, we can go into Stream Health and see that all of those statistics are monitored and graphed in real time, you can even remove some of them if necessary. Under Analytics, we can see other real time data, as well as historical information. And the other tabs allow for editing of some of our settings, like the Live Stream Setup, perhaps changing our encoder from SRT to RTMP, reconfiguring the player setup, or modifying text on our Hosted Page. 

Now that we’ve seen what’s available for live streams, let’s look at what Wowza Video can do when it comes to video-on-demand. Under Asset Management, we can upload assets for on demand viewing. Drag and drop or select them directly – doesn’t matter as long as they’re MP4s under 25 gigabytes, and your uploading only 10 at a time.

Once it’s done, you’ll see the file next to your other uploaded files or recorded streams under Manage Assets. It’s here where you can manage your entire asset library. If you look more closely at the asset I’ve uploaded, you can see it’s currently in an unpublished status, and therefore not viewable. On this page we have the options to Re-Stream that Asset as live, Edit the Asset, copy the stream URL, and even Download the MP4. 

The first thing you may want to do is edit the asset and set the status to Published. Now it’s viewable as a VOD asset for playback. Over in Video Info, I’ll also add a Title, Description, and a couple of Tags to help define my video asset. What’s great about this is the details that I add here can be utilized by our REST API for organizing and viewing on a webpage, just be sure you Save your changes.

Here’s an example of our REST API being applied to a website in order to show off our VOD assets. You’ll notice that all the videos that are displayed on the separate pages are based on custom tags. If I select one of the tags, I can see my video file with the tag that shows up, and selecting, it I can view the video along with the title I created. Since we’re using our REST API to generate results, their appearance on certain pages can be adjusted in real time by modifying the metadata in Wowza Video. 

Okay, so let’s look how we can adjust those settings. We can Edit the Asset by adding or removing a current tag, and then once the change is Saved, we can return to the example site, and if we select the racing tag to view all VOD assets containing that tag, we’ll see the asset we edited is now gone. Now we can go back to Wowza Video and Edit the Asset once again. We’ll re-add the tag and the metadata, and once the change has been Saved, we can go back to the example site, and we’ll see the change reflected if we reload the page once again, showing racing. So this is something you can customize using the REST API in whatever way that makes sense for your audience. Whether it’s by category, or most viewed, or most recently uploaded, all these options are available through the REST API. 

And that covers the basic usage of live streams and VOD asset management, if you’d like to see more analytics capabilities, or some of our advanced features, or discuss our Real-Time Streaming at Scale capabilities, you can reach us at Wowza at sales@wowza.com, and connect with one of our experienced sales reps.

Thanks for watching our demo of the Wowza Video platform, and happy streaming.