Re-selling WMSPanel by independent Wowza consultants

Wowza Media Systems uses a industry-proven approach of building its partners ecosystem. This includes approving streaming and product partners as well as encouraging software consultants to build a variety of Wowza-based applications.

When consultants builds some customer product, they often need to provide some reporting tool in addition to a general functionality. They either build their own custom applications or search for existing solutions. Let's see how WMSPanel can help Wowza consultants.

Let's take a look at the picture showing a consultant who has two clients that need reporting for their Wowza servers.

Wowza consultants re-selling WMSPanel.

Wowza statistics for clients of CDN services

Content Delivery Networks became the key element of today's streaming infrastructure. So lots of businesses use CDNs for bringing their content to users' devices.

However not everyone is happy about the statistics they get within CDN reporting. The main concerns are:

• Not sure about data accuracy;
• Need more reports;
• Need more flexibility in accessing stats.

So people need to compare their reports with some other source of information and have the data being accessible in a convenient way.

WMSPanel can help in case your CDN uses Wowza for delivery at the edges. Here is what a CDN needs to do to have WMSPanel reporting experience help the CDN users.

1. Sign up in WMSPanel. They can try it 2 weeks free of charge, just as any other newcomer.
2. Install WMSPanel agent on its edge servers, at least on the servers that are used for delivery of your content.
3. Create data slice for the servers and applications that are used by you and create user accounts for you.

If you want some other people to watch your statistics you may ask your CDN to set up an access via white label panel to show your stats via custom URL and logo. This gives some reporting flexibility. You may also get reports that are not available at some of the CDNs. Like, duration report, high precision report or lost traffic stats.

Needless to say that a CDN may use WMSPanel as an extra service either to make some money on it or to create some added value on top of traditional services.

Now demand your CDN to use WMSPanel as the reporting solution!

Read more use cases in our Case study section.


Also read more about WMSPanel streaming reporting.

Related documentation

End user reporting for Wowza, Billing customers using daily stats, Devices and Players report for Wowza, Statistics import API, Paywall for Wowza

Nimble Smooth re-streaming

Our team is continuously expanding Nimble Streamer capabilities. One of major use cases for Nimble is HTTP re-streaming. The first step was handling HLS and now we've done the next step and implemented Microsoft Smooth Streaming support for edge servers.

Now if you have an origin that streams with Smooth, all you need to do is the following steps:

1. Install Nimble Streamer. Small Ubuntu virtual server would be fine for this purpose. You can set it up either close to your viewers or just next to your server to make a smart proxy.
2. Set up re-streaming routes using WMSPanel web interface. You specify where your requests will come to (which domain or IP used by Nimble Streamer) and where those requests should be redirected (like, your Wowza origin).
3. Change your player settings in order to point to a new server.
4. You can also install Nimble as load balancer to forward your users' requests to the best re-streaming location.

Small Nimble executable is optimized for streaming while smart RAM caching and disk caching off-loads your origin, whether it's Wowza, IIS or any other media streaming server. This makes a truly transparent streaming so you'll be all set for new Smooth re-streaming experience.

Notice that you can also use HTTP hotlinking protection and geo-location restriction to protect your media while building paywalls for mobile media. Take a look at this SlideShare to learn more about other Nimble Streamer features.

Nimble Streamer overview from WMSPanel

If you have any questions or special use cases you'd like to cover, feel free to contact Nimble Streamer development team.

Related documentation

Nimble HTTP Streamer, HLS re-streaming set up, HDS re-streaming, Geo load balancing with Nimble Streamer, RAM caching for effective re-streaming, Nimble disk cache usage, Progressive download re-streaming, Nimble Streamer HTTP hotlinking protection, Nimble Streamer geo-location restriction, 

Support for Wowza GoCoder

Some time ago Wowza Media Systems released a promising product called GoCoder™. It's an application available for both iOS (iPhone and iPad) and for Android, it allows making live streaming from anywhere anytime delivering to any screen via pre-configured Wowza server.

This application requires some configuration on Wowza side. Specifically you need to create a application with certain settings. Traditionally you should have done this via manual config files editing. WMSPanel allow creating and controlling apps via simple web interface. Let's see what you can do with our service.

Enable Server management for Wowza by going to Control / Server management menu. You'll need to load server configuration first, but that's a single time operation.

Click on Create an application and choose GoCoder template from templates list.

Create Wowza GoCoder application from a template.

After the application is created, click on its name to make user and password settings, here's a brief screen shots instruction.

Go to server's management page and click on application name.

Click on Config application button.

Clicking on this button you will go to application settings page. Click on Set password button to see dialog for setting user and password.

Enter user and password with the format shown in the dialog.  Select servers and click on Apply to apply user/password settings to selected servers.

Setting password for Wowza application or instance.

In GoCoder application settings enter your Wowza server IP address and application name (ipad_live for this example).

That's it

You can start publishing your GoCoder streaming. You can also allow your end-users to set up GoCoder application via user permissions management.

You may also consider WMSPanel server tasks remote management via web console for convenient control of server-side commands. Launch any command, like ffmpeg process, with no need to log in via SSH, just an easy-to-use web interface.

Let us know if there are some specific settings you make to Wowza app to make GoCoder work smoothly so we could make them easier to manage.

Related documentation

Server management for Wowza, Application templates, Live streaming application template, MediaCaster and LiveStreamRecord streams control, Wowza application authentication, User permissions management, Paywall for Wowza, Server tasks remote management via web UI

RTMP and RTSP authentication for Wowza applications

WMSPanel team continuously improves Wowza server management feature set. Today we've released application RTMP and RTSP authentication settings.

Go to server's management page and click on application name.

You'll see application control page which has Config application button (check out server management blog post to see details regarding general server management set up).

Clicking on this button you will go to application settings page.

Numerous Wowza settings are split by use cases into tabs. To set up RTMP and RTSP authentication settings you need to go to respective tabs. RTMP and RTSP tabs allow setting global and per-application authentication.

Setting RTMP authentication level for Wowza.

Setting RTSP authentication level for Wowza.

You can also set up password for the authentication type you previously selected. Just click on Set password button to see dialog for setting user and password.

Here you can specify which protocol you want to protect with password by selecting the names by radio-buttons. For the selected protocol, the respective parameter "RTSP Authentication" (and/or "RTMP Authentication") will be set to "Per Application". Click on Apply to apply user/password settings to selected servers from the list.

Setting password for Wowza application or instance.

This small enhancement is part of server management capabilities available free of charge for any user both subscribed and on trial usage. Sign up to see this feature set in action.

Related documentation

Server management for Wowza, Paywall for Wowza, MediaCaster and LiveStreamRecord streams control, Wowza Transcoder add-on support, Application templates, Monitoring server CPU and RAM, Nimble HTTP Streamer

White label branded panel via SSL

WMSPanel as white label branded panel provides the ability to present reports and Nimble Streamer control via custom domain with custom logo without mentioning WMSPanel itself.

You can buy SSL certificate and set up a domain with SSL proxy to our website.

Here are the steps to make your branded panel available via HTTPS. Let's say you want to have branded panel for https://panel.example.com/

1. In your WMSPanel account go to Settings / Branded panel menu and add panel.example.com domain with proper logo (if one is needed).
2. Bring up SSL proxy at one of the servers in your infrastructure.
3. Set up panel.example.com domain in your DNS to point to your proxy.
4. Buy a certificate for panel.example.com (you probably have one already).
5. In your SSL proxy, map panel.exampler.com to partners-ssl-cf.wmspanel.com

Here is an example of nginx configuration:

server {

    listen 80;

    server_name panel.example.com;

    return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;

}

server {

    listen 443 ssl;

    ssl_certificate         /etc/nginx/ssl/nginx.crt;

    ssl_certificate_key     /etc/nginx/ssl/nginx.key;

    server_name panel.example.com;

 

    location / {

        proxy_pass https://partners-ssl-cf.wmspanel.com/;

        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

        proxy_set_header Partners-Host $http_host;

        proxy_redirect off;

        break;

    }

}

That's it. When you go to https://panel.example.com/, your request is proxied to the WMSPanel as branded domain. So all pages will have proper logo for everyone who accesses the panel via new domain.

You can contact us if you have any questions about setting up branded panel.

Read more about slice-related features in on the dedicated Slices & Branding page.

Related documentation

End user reporting, Custom CSS for white label