March 31, 2015

The State of Streaming Protocols - March 2015

WMSPanel team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols. March showed a significant increase of views.

HLS share broke a new barrier getting about 77% share while RTMP share (18%) went down again. The MPEG-DASH increased to 1.3M views becoming more popular among our customers.

All these metrics calculations are based on 4 billion views. The stats are collected from 1600+ media servers, including WowzaNimble StreamerRed5nginx-rtmp-module and Flussonic. Check the charts below.



You can compare that to February stats below.

Media streaming industry news for March

Our team continuously tracks news about media streaming, online video and audio from around the globe. This helps us understanding where the industry goes and what can we follow it.

So we decided to make a small digest of what we thought might be interesting for our customers and followers.

A few words on finances.

Twitter acquires Periscope, the Meerkat-style live streaming app. Congrats to both teams!

Interesting news from music industry: US streaming revenues overtake CD sales. Spotify, Rhapsody and other audio services work hard on that.

A long-time case between Wowza and Adobe about RTMP is now closed. Wowza Media Systems and Adobe Systems Settle Patent Cases. Which seems to be the right thing, especially now when RTMP share is continuously going down.

A new patents pool has been started for HEVC/H.265. The HEVCAdvance company will be now responsible for it with more new to appear in Q3 2015.

Now back to technologies.

Nicolas Weil from Akamai has released a great article on The State of MPEG-DASH 2015 which gives ideas on where DASH is now and where it's moving towards.
More news on DASH: bitmovin has released MPEG-DASH Device Compatibility digest to give visual overview of what's up with DASH from devices' and browsers perspective.
WMSPanel is an associate member of DASH Industry Forum and we keep watching after this technology very closely.

StreamingMedia.com gave a great article on How to Shoot Aerial Video Using Drones and Quadcopters. We look forward to seeing more on aerial video at NAB Show 2015 soon.

YouTube sheds some light on its 360-degree video: A new way to see and share your world with 360-degree video.

Same news from Facebook: they will support spherical video In news feed and Oculus as was announced on F8 conference.
Speaking of F8: Facebook Will Now Let You Embed Facebook Videos On Other Sites which reminds of YouTube embedding techniques. We'll definitely see something new in embedded videos soon.

And a few materials from StreamingMedia.com about the state of codecs, encoding and transcoding trends for 2015:



NAB Show in April

April will be full of news from NABShow. Our team representative will be there to bring something interesting, so follow us to get news and updates, and let us know if you'd like to meet there.

March 30, 2015

Icecast playlist support for input

Nimble Streamer has arich functionality for audio streaming. The most popular feature set is Icecast Streaming which includes RTMP to Icecast transmuxing and Icecast restreaming with metatags support. Single transmuxing engine allows producing streams via any supported protocol.

Setting up Icecast from some source may require to use existing playlists. E.g. you have http://myradiostation.com:8002/live.m3u playlist which includes the following lines.
http://myradiostation.com:8002/channel1
http://myradiostation.com:8002/channel2
http://myradiostation.com:8002/channel3
http://myradiostation.com:8002/channel4
Entering all these lines into WMSPanel web UI may take some time. So now WMSPanel supports entering playlists as an input for the setup.

Follow this Icecast streaming setup procedure to add a playlist URL into Live pull settings. Our system will pick it up and generate corresponding streams for each stream.


Let us know if you have any questions regarding this feature set.

Related documentation


Nimble Streamer audio streamingRTMP to Icecast transmuxingIcecast restreaming

March 20, 2015

Nimble Streamer routes control API

WMSPanel provides rich API for obtaining various data from our products. This includes status API for Nimble Streamer which allows getting real-time information about each Nimble instance and make decisions like load balancing etc.

Now we introduce API for controlling Nimble Streamer behavior.
This includes the following scenarios:

  • VOD streaming via HLS, MPEG-DASH and progressive download;
  • re-streaming content via HLS, HDS, SmoothStreaming and progressive download.

So API allows performing actions which you can find via "Nimble Streamer / Edit Nimble routes" menu. All work is done by manipulating routes. Each route tells Nimble Streamer what to do with incoming connections.

March 17, 2015

Nimble Streamer for MacOS is available

Good news for MacOS users. Our team has completed porting Nimble Streamer to MacOS, so now all the streaming features previously available for Linux and Windows are now working on MacOS.

It's the same excellent Nimble software which is already used for Linux and Windows servers worldwide, and now you may also try it on your Mac.
Try this release now via easy-to-use installer: https://wmspanel.com/nimble/install#os_mac

Basic steps include WMSPanel registration (if you haven't done it yet), installation via setup wizard and server registration. Having Nimble Streamer installed you may setup all the streaming scenarios which we have a lot in our features package.

Feel free to share your MacOS usage experience of Nimble, we're opened for any feedback.

Install Nimble Streamer for Mac now.

Related documentation


Nimble Streamer, Live streaming via Nimble Streamer, VOD streaming via Nimble Streamer, WMSPanel Paywall

March 10, 2015

Using Nimble Streamer as HTTP streaming origin source

Nimble Streamer is used for a variety of streaming scenarios which includes all flavors of live streaming and video-on-demand. On the popular use cases is when Nimble is used as an origin for several edges - which may also be powered by Nimble.

This works pretty well but some scenarios use Nimble Streamer as origin for further usage in content delivery networks which are very picky for the streams URLs and format. Even though Nimble is fully compliant with used protocols' specs, it uses session IDs in URL for identifying viewer for precise statistics calculation. Some CDNs require not to have any additional streaming parameters so our team made adjustments to allow customers to use Nimble without additional session information.

The general steps to use this behavior, are those:

  1. Set up streaming behavior for Nimble for HTTP streaming (HLS, DASH, Icecast etc.).
  2. Specify what origin applications will not use sessions for output streams.

As a result, the output streams won't have sessions information and Nimble will not force a client to have it. So please beware as follows.

WMSPanel application statistics will include only bandwidth and application-aggregated traffic.No connections count or duration will be calculated.

Let's go step by step to set up this behavior.

Set up streaming behavior 


We assume you've already installed Nimble Streamer. So now you need to set up Nimble streaming behavior, i.e. describe source and output for your media. Here are some of the examples of what you may use:

All these scenarios will define output application as one of results. Traditionally, the application name is something which stands at the beginning of URL. E.g. in http://127.0.0.1:8081/live-origin/stream/playlist.m3u8 , "live-origin" is the name of an app.

Specify origin application


Now you may use existing setup for further origin behavior setup.

Go to Nimble Streamer -> HTTP origin applications menu. You will see blank list of apps.

Empty origin apps list.
Clicking on Add origin application, you will see a dialog as shown below.

Setting up HTTP origin application.

It allows specifying the name of the application which will have no additional information. You may apply it to multiple servers by clicking on servers' names. When the setup is ready, click on Save to apply the setting to selected servers.

The origin apps list will be populated with a new setting.

New settings are applied.
Now, if you have a stream http://127.0.0.1:8081/live-origin/stream/playlist.m3u8 , its URL will not include session information from this moment.

Server-level setting


You may specify this setting on a server level to apply for all applications at once.

Use http_origin parameter in nimble.conf to define this behavior. Don't forget to re-start Nimble Streamer after applying new parameter


Single input, multiple output


Nimble allows producing multiple streams applications from same source, so for any input stream you may create separate applications for different tasks. E.g. one for end-users streaming, and another one for using as origin. WMSPanel web UI allows doing these tasks easily.


This feature is widely used for CDN-friendly streaming scenarios.


If your destination allows accepting RTMP, you may also consider using RTMP re-publishing feature set which would make Nimble to publish RTMP whenever a stream is available.

If you run into any questions, you can contact us any time, we're ready to help.

Related documentation


Nimble StreamerNimble live streaming, Nimble VOD streamingRTMP re-publishing

March 1, 2015

New from February 2015

WMSPanel and Nimble Streamer February news are online.

They include the following updates
  • In-depth statistics were updated with grouping and comparison.
  • WMSAuth paywall articles have a couple of useful updates.
  • A new load balancing article is available.
  • Nimble Streamer now has Windows support.
  • Nimble AES-128 encryption support for HLS is ready.
  • MP4 tracks selection support for VOD HLS has been released in Nimble.
  • Icecast metadata support was added in Nimble.
Read this news digest to get more details.

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The State of Streaming Protocols - February 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.

Last 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 RTMP share (19%) decreased while progressive download (6%) went up.

We'd like to emphasize the significant rise of MPEG-DASH to 780K views. This is the result of latest MPEG-DASH feature set available in Nimble Streamer.

All these metrics calculations are based on 2.8 billion views. Check them below.

The State of Streaming Protocols - February 2015
You can compare that with January stats below.