March 31, 2014

Singapore checkpoint for Dispersa monitoring

We are glad to announce Singapore to be the next location for one more checkpoint for Dispersa in addition to New York, San Francisco and Amsterdam distributed checkpoints network.

With this South-East Asia checkpoint our 24/7 free streams monitoring becomes more pervasive for your convenience.

Notice that you can always add your own private checkpoint to make streams monitoring within limited access networks. E.g. you may have geographically locked streaming limited to specific countries.

Dispersa distributed checkpoints network.


Related documentation


Dispersa streams monitoring, Nimble Streamer

March 26, 2014

Adaptive bitrate HLS from MPEG-TS live stream

Nimble Streamer is making a significant step towards advanced HLS coverage. In addition to recently introduced UDP MPEG-TS to HLS transmuxing, today we release adaptive bitrate HTTP Live Streaming generated from UDP MPEG-TS live stream.

Update: New article about MPEG-TS transmuxing to HLS, RTMP etc is available. Also, read general Nimble Streamer MPEG2TS feature set page.




If you have a source of MPEG-TS stream transmitted via UDP and you want to generate fixed bitrate or adaptive bitrate HLS stream, your general use case would be as follows.

Pre-requisites: install Nimble Streamer and set up your UDP source to stream to Nimble Streamer server.

  1. Using WMSPanel, define which interface (IP and port) will be listening for incoming streams via UDP. Those streams will be used as a source for generating outgoing streams.
  2. Define what outgoing streams will be generated from previously defined incoming streams. They can be used as fixed bitrate streams for your viewers and re-used as a source for ABR set up.
  3. If you'd like to create ABR streams, define adaptive streams using the variety of previously defined outgoing streams.

Nimble Streamer is getting the incoming stream and converting the UDP MPEG-TS stream into HLS chunks. These chunks are being sent to the player right after the request comes in. MPEG-TS source may disconnect and connect again, but the stream will resume producing chunks from the moment of incoming stream resume.

So you may provide origin streams via HLS protocol, both with fixed bitrate and with adaptive bitrate. This diagram visualizes the described workflow. The same workflow applies to transmuxing MPEG2TS over HTTP to HLS.



Here's the step-by-step instruction for fixed bitrate and adaptive bitrate set up.


March 18, 2014

Pay-per-view for Nimble Streamer

Nimble Streamer is a product made for streaming business of any size, starting from the smallest start-up companies. Most of them want to monetize their media in all possible ways so after a while we implemented a feature set which we call pay-per-view (PPV) for Nimble Streamer.

What are the use cases for this kind of functionality?
  • pay per view logic for streaming media providers: each user's connection is tracked;
  • pay per minute logic: view time per viewer is gathered separately;
  • re-streaming protection when 1 person pays for 1 account and provides access for group of people: just block the one who is breaking your terms of use;
  • unique visitors statistics calculation: you may collect and show real-time and daily statistics;
  • education video management for per-student metrics;
  • you name it.
So it's a good foundation for creating paywalls.

Let's see how it works.

The main workflow is based on push API. Nimble Streamers sends (pushes) user data to customer, then customer decides what to do with each individual unique user and replies with the decision back to the agent. This works as follows:
  1. Customer implements API handler that is able to accept POST requests.
  2. Customer adds pay-per-view signature into existing media links, with primarily a unique ID for each of his clients.
  3. WMSPanel provides web UI for setting up handler URL and some other parameters.
  4. Nimble Streamer sends request to handler on a periodical basis which is defined via web UI. Sync contains all users' IDs, IPs, view time delta and media names.
  5. Customer handler makes required decisions based on company business logic and sends response to Nimble. This response specifies which users must be blocked from watching media.
  6. Blocked users are shut down immediately, while others keep watching.
  7. All Nimble Streamers will send sync-ups to the same single API handler.
Paywall pay-per-view based on Nimble Streamer.

Further setup


Please read our web site section describing Pay-per-view set up with pictures and code samples.

You can also read "The Paranoid’s Guide to Internet Video Streaming" by Thomas Gires to see real-life example of using pay-per-view feature set.

Next


This feature set requires changes in customer business logic and proper set up at WMSPanel. This is why we're looking forward to seeing your feedback, questions and comments. Send us your code snippets so we could check them and propose improvements.

If you need more protection for HLS, please consider using HLS AES-128 DRM encryption supported by Nimble.

Contact us if you have anything to say regarding this feature set.

Related documentation


Nimble HTTP StreamerNimble Streamer overview videoStreaming VOD with Nimble StreamerHLS re-streaming set upSmooth Streaming supportNimble Streamer HTTP hotlinking protectionHotlinking protection with stream-based signatureNimble Streamer geo-location restrictionCalculating HLS statistics, Pay-per-view for NimblePaywall for WowzaPay-per-view for Wowza Media Server,

March 11, 2014

WMSPanel是Wowza Media Server的统计与控制面板

We're glad to announce that WMSPanel UI now speaks Chinese!

WMSPanel是Wowza Media Server的统计与控制面板

看服务器统计数据

WMSPanel 可以显示实时的统计数据,也可以显示按连接的、按流量的、观看频道速度的、按时长的或按地理位置的每日 Wowza统计数据。 可以给用户设置统计数据的切片并在自己的域名设置包含你公司商标的控制面板。


统计数据的存取权管理

你可以制定特殊的规程来限制任何服务器的、应用程序的或任何流媒体的连接数量、地理位置和IP范围。 预防re-streaming 保护可以防止用户无权利地利用你的资料。 Pay-per-view 供能使控制每一单独用户的行为。 

So now our customers from China and other countries with Chinese-speaking communities may use our excellent web UI in their native language.

Would you like to contribute and see your language in WMSPanel? Contact us to see what we can do.

March 6, 2014

The Paranoid’s Guide to Internet Video Streaming

Recently our customer and collaborator Thomas Gires released an article describing the process of building secure streaming infrastructure with WMSPanel, Wowza Streaming Engine and Nimble Streamer. He called it The Paranoid’s Guide to Internet Video Streaming and it expresses his experience in video streaming.

You can contact Thomas if you have any questions or if you want to discuss further use of his professional services.

Here is the copy of aforementioned article for convenience of our customers and visitors.