Happy New Year from WMSPanel team

The year of 2013 was full of great events for our team. Let's see what we've got for you this year.

WMSPanel

Our control and reporting panel has been significantly re-worked. New control and reporting features for Wowza Media Server brought new excellent user experience for your existing and new customers.
WMSPanel is now available in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Serbian. Thank everyone who participated in this great achievement!
We've significantly re-worked our background early this year. By now we are handling 900+ media servers with ease. Scalable and robust architecture will allow us handling unlimited number of new users with predictably great quality.

Nimble Streamer

This new product was introduced in spring and has grown its audience since then. People love easy HLS VOD streaming! Many customers like improving their live HLS re-streaming with Nimble Streamer edges and protect HLS streams from hotlinking.

We have a lot of plans for Nimble Streamer in 2014 so stay tuned for updates!

Dispersa

The last but not the least - Nimble Streamer and WMSPanel was used as a basis for the newest service which we called Dispersa. It's a streams availability checker which uses distributed network or checkpoints. Early next year we'll introduce periodical checks, statistics collection and other quality of service check overs.


We thank all of our customers and trial users for being with us this year.

Happy New Year! We'll see you in 2014.

Nimble Streamer on CentOS, Red Hat and Debian

Our team created Nimble Streamer to be installed on Linux OS. This is the platform which is best fit for high-load projects. Obviously most streaming media projects are born to be highly loaded, this is why we chose Linux as target platform.

Initially we started with Ubuntu Linux which is once of the most popular OSes on the market. Now we've made the step forward and made Nimble Streamer available on several other flavors of Linux.

Here's the full list of operating systems where Nimble Streamer is tested before every release:

• Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid
• Ubuntu 12.04 Precise
• Debian 6.0.8 Squeeze
• Debian 7.2 Wheezy
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
• CentOS 6

Please read the latest version of Nimble Streamer installation instructions. to see how it needs to be properly installed on these platforms. There are few easy steps there and also links to how-to pages describing the installation process in details and pictures.

Feel free to contact if you need any help with setting up and tuning Nimble Streamer.

Related documentation

Nimble HTTP Streamer, MP4 transmuxing to HLS VOD streaming, Streaming VOD with DigitalOcean and Nimble Streaming, Nimble configs explained, HLS re-streaming set up, WMSPanel Slideshare

Dispersa: a distributed streams availability check service

WMSPanel team proudly presents a new product for improving streaming media quality of service.

It's Dispersa, a service for distributed streams availability checking. This is a first step towards creating a service for checking the quality of experience.

If you're running a streaming media business you need to bring proper quality of service. This requires some significant effort. One of the basic but efficient practices is the stream availability check. This one needs some external point of view at your streaming infrastructure hence the additional efforts.

Currently you can enter a URL of the stream and make it checked over for free.

The following protocols are supported:

• HTTP Live Streaming (HLS);
• HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS);
• Smooth Streaming;
• MPEG-DASH;
• RTSP;
• RTMP;
• Icecast;
• Shoutcast.

The stream is being checked in parallel from all of existing checkpoints. A checkpoint is a server with Nimble Streamer installed. Nimble is performing required check and sends results to WMSPanel which shows all performed actions on the monitoring dashboard.

We will be expanding this distributed network of checkpoints by adding new servers in various geographical points. You may also participate in this: you may add checkpoint at your own locations and be listed in our checkpoints page. Later on we'll add the ability to add checkpoints in your private networks to make all check-overs in closed environment.

Now make your stream availability check now for free.

Also try our 24/7 streams monitoring feature set with streams monitoring history. If you'd like to have same statistics within your monitoring or analytic tools, use Dispersa alerts push API to get notified about streams going offline and online.

Take a look at our screencast describing the service:

Q: My streaming network is protected with WMSPanel hotlinking protection. Can Dispersa work here?

Yes, just set up allow list for Dispersa checkpoints IP range.


Here's what we want to do next:

• Profiling.
• Quality of experience metrics.

Contact us if you need some specific or common use case - we're opened for feedback.

Related documentation

Nimble HTTP Streamer, Nimble Streamer overview video, WMSPanel: cloud reporting and control panel, Set up Dispersa 24/7 stream monitoring, Streams monitoring history, Dispersa alerts push API, Server tasks remote management via web UI

Nimble Streamer edges benchmark

People ask us about the performance metrics of Nimble Streamer. What are the minimum HW requirements? How many connections will it handle on particular server? Even though we have our internal test results, we're always looking for real life examples to prove our expectations and measurements.

One of our customers recently allowed making several snapshots of statistics which we'd like to show to you.

There were 13 Nimble Streamer machines actively re-streaming HLS from encoding origins. Here's how all servers real-time chat looked like (origins are excluded):

Real-time connections and bandwidth chart for Nimble-powered 13 edge servers.

As you see there were about 4000 connections total and they've generated almost 7.6Gbps of average bandwidth.
The incoming connections were balanced over all edge servers equally. Let's see some of those edge servers metrics.

This one has less than 1% CPU load and 500 MB RAM used for handling 170 connection at 300 Mbps.

CPU and RAM charts for one of Nimble Streamer edges.

Real-time chart for one of Nimble Streamer edges.

This one has less than 1% CPU and 480 MB RAM used for 270 connections at 130 Mbps.

CPU and RAM charts for another Nimble Streamer edge.

One more real-time report for Nimble Streamer edge.

As you see, Nimble Streamer doesn't consume CPU and much RAM being a re-streaming edge server so you can install it on any available small servers and off-load your encoding origin.

We'll keep posting other bench marking examples to show Nimble Streamer in action.

Related documentation

Nimble HTTP Streamer, Load balancing and failover with Nimble Streamer, HLS re-streaming set up, Smooth Streaming support, RAM caching for effective re-streaming, WMSPanel Slideshare,

Citrix acquires Skytide

Dan Rayburn has recently brought interesting news: Citrix Acquires CDN and Service Provider Analytics Company Skytide.

Skytide's solutions cover analytics and reporting for medium to large CDNs. As per Dan, Citrix plans to integrate Skytide’s technology into their ByteMobile platform.

So our team would like to congratulate Skytide and Citrix with this big step forward!



Meanwhile you can read about WMSPanel for hosting providers and CDNs and see how you can improve Wowza end-user reporting experience with WMSPanel.

Nimble Streamer overview video

We've shot and released a new video! It's about Nimble Streamer.

Watch this:



This video is available on our Demo page, it's streamed by Nimble itself.

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 of Nimble Streamer and WMSPanel.

WMSPanel community forum is now opened

We are excited to announce that we've launched a company forum!

Visit WMSPanel community forum

It has 4 major categories.

• WMSPanel functionality - it has general questions regarding our cloud control and reporting panel.
• Paywall - is about hot-linking protection, geo-location restriction, pay-per-view and other limitations provided as part of our services.
• Nimble Streamer - here you can ask and answer questions about our light-weight streaming server for HLS, Smooth and progressive download.
• Case study - it's about showing your real-life examples, here you can tell us about how our products helped your business.

You may post topics using your native language. This would be even better because WMSPanel is international-oriented product used by people from all around the world, so your opinion will be appreciated.

We've also gathered a series of frequently asked questions under FAQ tag. So yo can see what people ask most.

Now, go to the forum and post your use cases of our products.