Wowza Video™ Real-Time Streaming at Scale provides half-second latency to all your viewers, no matter where they are. Real-time streaming is perfect for interactive use cases like video chats, auctions, esports, fitness, e-commerce, gambling, and more.
Wowza Video offers two workflows for creating and executing your real-time streaming solution: Real-Time Streaming at Scale and WebRTC. Before you build your solution through Wowza Video or the Wowza Video REST API, you'll need to choose the workflow that best meets your business and streaming needs.
Real-Time Streaming at Scale workflow
Real-Time Streaming at Scale for Wowza Video deploys WebRTC across a custom CDN to provide near-limitless scale. This workflow is suitable to deliver streams to an audience of up to a million viewers with half-second latency and the full quality of an adaptive bitrate stream. The Real-Time Streaming at Scale workflow instantly scales to accommodate the size of the audience as it grows.
Real-Time Streaming at Scale can be implemented using the Wowza Video REST API or UI. Wowza Video can ingest any of the following types of sources for Real-Time Streaming at Scale:
- Browser-based capture with the Wowza Video JavaScript SDK for Real-Time Streaming at Scale - ~500ms latency
- OBS Enhanced for Real-Time- ~500 ms latency
- RTMP encoders -~100 ms latency with U.S.-based ingest
Wowza provides both broadcast and player JS SDKs for embedding in pages. These tools are provided during a free Quick Start session with professional services.
Tip: When you're ready to implement Real-Time Streaming at Scale, consider using the Wowza Flowplayer Real-Time Streaming (WebRTC) plugin for playback if you want to embed and configure the player in your own page. Wowza Flowplayer comes standard as part of a Wowza Video subscription.
You must obtain a license for Real-Time Streaming at Scale to add this capability to your new or existing account. Contact our sales team for more information.
Real-Time Streaming at Scale Features and Benefits
- Instant scalability
- Globally available streams
- Encoder agnostic
- Publish anywhere
Free session with professional services to get started
Learn more
- To deliver real-time streams with Wowza Video, see Deliver real-time streams to viewers with Wowza Video.
- To learn more about how to use the Wowza Video REST API to deliver real-time streams, see Deliver real-time streams to viewers with the Wowza Video REST API.
- To learn more about the JavaScript SDK you can use with Real-Time Streaming at Scale, see About the Wowza Video JavaScript SDK for Real-Time Streaming at Scale.
WebRTC workflow
Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) is an open-source project to enable real-time communication of audio, video, and data in web browsers and native apps. Wowza WebRTC eliminates the need to install plug-ins or download third-party software. Wowza WebRTC typically offers sub-500 millisecond latency with the added benefit of not requiring additional encoders or players since it runs from your browser using built-in cameras.
Wowza Video also provides hosted pages that allow you to publish and playback WebRTC streams with minimal setup required.
Note: The WebRTC-hosted pages are supported on the latest versions of Chrome and Safari, as well as Edge version 79 and later.
Tip: When you're ready to implement WebRTC, consider using the Wowza Flowplayer Real-Time Streaming (WebRTC) plugin for playback if you want to embed and configure the player in your own page. Wowza Flowplayer comes standard as part of a Wowza Video subscription.
With Wowza Video, you can ingest and deliver WebRTC streams with all major desktop and mobile browsers that support WebRTC APIs or you can deliver the WebRTC stream over a CDN for HLS playback.
HLS delivery is a standard, mature stream delivery protocol that makes it easy to take advantage of content delivery networks (CDNs) to provide content to large numbers of viewers. HLS is a great choice for viewer scale and feature richness, while WebRTC might be your choice if low latency is your primary need.
Because the maturity and technology for WebRTC are different than HLS, you'll want to consider the trade-offs for each protocol.
| HLS | WebRTC | |
|---|---|---|
| Latency | 15-20 seconds typical | 500 milliseconds or less |
| Technology | TCP | UDP (primary), TCP (optional) |
| Features | Depending on the player you use, you can take advantage of:
|
Industry-leading low latency |
| Player compatibility | Wide variety of features you can take advantage of. | Browser-based with a more limited feature set, that varies per browser. |
| Quality: Video quality vs speed | Prioritizes video quality through adaptive bitrate (ABR) renditions for the highest quality playback for each viewer's device and connection speed. |
Prioritizes real-time latency. |
| Security | You can implement the following security features for HLS streams:
|
WebRTC always uses the following security features:
|
| Scale | Tens, thousands, up to millions of viewers |
300 viewers. Standard WebRTC-to-WebRTC streams are limited to approximately 300 viewers in Wowza Video because of the technology used. WebRTC can be paired with HLS for broad distribution with WebRTC for limited low-volume, low-latency streaming. See Deliver WebRTC streams to viewers for HLS playback using Wowza Video and Deliver WebRTC streams to viewers for HLS playback using the Wowza Video REST API for more information. |
| Cost | Incur CDN distribution costs per viewer | Distribution direct from transcoder. Incurs egress per viewer. |
| Get Started |
Deliver WebRTC streams to viewers using Wowza Video Deliver WebRTC streams to viewers using the Wowza Video REST API |
