The State of Streaming Protocols - January 2015

WMSPanel team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols. January showed a lot of views which means more of interesting content to look at.

This month we've added Icecast audio and MPEG-TS among other protocols. Nimble Streamer customers use them more and more extensively, especially with the latest Icecast meta tags support, so we'd like to start tracking their dynamics as well.

We still see huge HLS share (about 69%). The shares of RTMP (22%), RTSP (3%) and progressive download (~5%) are the same this month. Icecast number has doubled from nearly 4M to 8M views.

All these metrics calculations are based on 3 billion views.

You can compare that with December stats below.

WMSPanel joins DASH Industry Forum

WMSPanel team has been working on Nimble Streamer MPEG-DASH feature set for some time and we've released several features which are interesting for streaming community, such as

• VOD streaming;
• Live streaming;
• Hotlink protection and pay-per-view;
• DASH streams monitoring via Dispersa;

with more features to come soon.

As you know, DASH standard is based on efforts of leading experts from the most influential companies in the industry. It has become an industry ISO standard which makes it a foundation for further deployments. The experts' community created an organization called DASH Industry Forum which has the goal of further improvement and promotion of DASH for wide streaming media market which is continuously expanding and is demanding for this kind of solution.

Having our own DASH server solutions, we would like to share our expertise and so last week WMSPanel team became a DASH Industry Forum associate member. We are very excited to join the organization. Now we have the opportunity to make our contributions to the community, we hope our expertise will be useful.

If you have any questions or feature requests regarding MPEG-DASH functionality, please contact us any time.

Debugging WMSPanel push API for pay-per-view and alerts

WMSPanel is a platform for reporting, monitoring and control over media servers. Some of our features allow receiving data via push API for further processing which includes those common steps:

1. Create a handler available for incoming HTTP POST requests.
2. Set up handler URL within WMSPanel account setting at Control -> API setup menu.
3. Your media servers start sending data to a handler.

The incoming data may differ as well as further activities. Currently the following features are using push API:

• Nimble Streamer pay-per-view.
• Wowza Streaming Engine pay-per-view.
• RTMP publish and unpublish notifications for Wowza.
• Dispersa streams monitoring alerts API.
• Servers offline notifications for all types of supported servers.
• Some of daily statistics export push API for all types of servers.

As a customer is setting up a handler, he may need some real life examples of the data which he is supposed to get.

WMSPanel now provides a test handler which you may use for sending requests from your servers. It also provides a web page for viewing the results so you could see what is being sent. Let's see what you need to do in order to use it.