Wowza Streaming Cloud: Getting Started

Wowza Streaming Cloud is a great service for businesses interested in getting started quickly with broadcasting live video streams. To demonstrate, we’ll create a new live stream using OBS Studio as our encoder software and THEOPlayer to play back the live stream on a webpage. Sign into your Wowza Streaming Cloud account or click the link below the log in to start a trial. Once logged in, we’ll see the main dashboard displaying current information relating to your account. Start by selecting Live Streams and choosing to Add Live Stream. We’ll want to name this live stream something unique and then we’ll need to select the location closest to where we’re broadcasting from. This is where the media server instance will reside to transcode the streams.

Click Next and then choose the camera or encoder we’ll use to connect with. There are a number of easy options for connecting with other Wowza products or partner products, but since we’re using OBS Studio for the encoder, we’ll want to select Other RTMP. Most encoders use the RTMP protocol for sending a stream. Playback often occurs using the HLS protocol, which can be transcoded here for adaptive bitrate. We can also choose to pass through with no transcoding as long as we have a 24/7 subscription with Wowza Streaming Cloud. For now, we’ll leave this default as well as the options to push directly to Wowza Streaming Cloud, reduce latency, and change aspect ratio.

Select the recording option, leave closed captions alone, use source security and then click Next. Since we’re using THEOplayer, we can leave most of these player settings alone, but we can choose later to add a countdown clock before the live stream begins, as well as a poster image and a corporate bug to place on the corner of our choosing. Next, we’ll say No to a hosted webpage since we’ll be making our own and Next again. We can review our settings before we finish. Most of these settings can be edited in the future. Now the live streams been created.

We can Start Live Stream now if we choose, spinning up the media server instance. However, without a source, nothing will be received. So our next step is to set up OBS Studio with the source connection information provided below. Don’t forget, you’ll also need to see the source password. In OBS Studio, you may be starting from scratch, so at the very least, you’ll need to go into the sources and choose to add a video capture device. Once it’s created, add the webcam of the computer and this is generally 1280 by 720 resolution, which is why we previously left as default the source aspect ratio the same. But you can always change this in Wowza Streaming Cloud going all the way up to 4K resolution.

In Settings, select Stream and from Service choose Custom. From the source connection information, we’ll copy Primary Server over to the Server. We’ll then show our Stream Name for which we’ll copy over to the Stream Key and then we’ll use authentication and copy the Source Username and Source Password into the username and password fields. We may need to show the password just to confirm it’s correct. Once these changes are okayed, we can Start Streaming. We’ll see at the bottom of the screen how long we’ve been live and if we go back to Wowza Streaming Cloud, we’ll see a video thumbnail appear along with statistics that let you know the health of your live stream.

If we scroll down the overview of this stream, we’ll find the HLS link for playback. To simply test the stream, we can use the demo zone for THEOPlayer. Use the first option to test our HLS stream, pasting the HLS link at the top, and then load your live stream and hit playback in the window. At this point, we’ll see our live stream playing along with other statistical information. To add this to a webpage, we’ll need an account in THEOPlayer. Once we have an account, you can go to SDKs and Create a new SDK that will use HTML5.

Name the SDK, and click Next, while there are a number of different options available for THEOPlayer, we’re going to leave all of these default and Next we’ll go straight to publish. Now, it may take a few minutes for the player to be built, but once it’s complete, we can add your HLS link as the media stream and Load it. Then use the embed option for your webpage code. You can follow the step-by-step or use the full sample page to get the file for download. We can then open up that file in a browser and click the Play button to start viewing the live stream.

That’s all you need to get started streaming your broadcasts with Wowza Streaming Cloud. Don’t forget: When you’re done testing, to stop the live stream in OBS, as well as going into Wowza Streaming Cloud and stopping it there as well. To see your recording, you’ll need to go to the selected live stream and click on Recordings. Once the status says complete, you can download the video file. All right, well hey thanks for watching and happy streaming.