The State of Streaming Protocols - July 2015

WMSPanel team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols.

The metrics calculations are based on nearly 1.4 billion views. The stats are collected from 1800+ media servers (including Wowza, Nimble Streamer and Flussonic).

HLS share is at 69% share with slight decrease of RTMP and Icecast numbers. Check the chart below for more.

The State of Streaming Protocols - July 2015.

You can compare that to June stats below.

Mobile broadcasting SDK

WMSPanel team is pleased to announce new product for Android mobile platform, called Mobile broadcasting SDK.

Live broadcasting from Android device

At the moment, our WMSPanel service processes data from thousands of different media servers those are doing hundreds of thousands of streams and our Nimble Streamer media server handles billions of connections monthly. We experience a constantly growing demand for new features from our customers who are interested in mobile streaming solutions.

Mobile streaming share increases rapidly, because modern devices are able to provide pretty high quality video and audio content, and, what is important, are broadly used. However, building just streaming application isn't main objective. What really comes to the fore is ability to apply company's business logic to mobile streaming within existing infrastructure or build such infrastructure in easy and common way.

Adding preconfigured Nimble Streamer server to WMSPanel

This article is obsolete. Please use this latest deployment automation feature to add pre-configured Nimble Streamer instance in your WMSPanel account.

Advanced MPEG-TS delivery over UDP via Nimble Streamer

There is wide range of tasks associated with streaming of media content in MPEG-TS over UDP in corporate networks. Nimble Streamer is capable of transmitting stream to multicast network, DVR Storage, transcoder or presentation monitor.

MPEG-TS over UDP multicast via Nimble Streamer

In some cases it is necessary to transmit multiple programs in a single MPEG-TS stream. This activity is often related to private networks (hotel, enterprise), when using a hardware decoder that supports only MPEG-TS as input.

Packing multiple RTMP, RTSP or MPEG-TS streams to single MPEG-TS UDP stream.

The distinction of Nimble Streamer is the ability to transmux up to 256 RTMP, RTSP and MPEG-TS streams into single multi-program MPEG-TS UDP stream. For each incoming stream the unique PMT PID, Video PID and Audio PID values are assigned. You can take RTMP, RTSP and MPEG-TS streams from any sources, transmux them into a single UDP MPEG-TS stream and transmit via multicast.

Streaming VOD from remote HTTP storage via Nimble Streamer

Many broadcasting companies use remote media storage as a convenient way of organizing video-on-demand (VOD) streaming infrastructure. The main advantage of dedicated storage is having all files located in single repository, instead of maintaining multiple copies across all edge servers, and save costs on multiple large hard disk drives. The second advantage is ability to organize centralized backup and failure recovery and convenience of managing content, such as adding, removing or replacing media files. This is why storages like Amazon S3 are extremely popular.

Remote storage support is now available in Nimble Streamer. It works with any server, that supports file access via HTTP protocol with HTTPS as an option. Nimble Streamer support HLS, and MPEG-DASH transmuxing as well as progressive download from remotely stored media content. Advanced caching techniques allows Nimble to effectively stream files, those size exceeds available file system capacity.

Streaming remotely stored Media

Nimble Streamer is extremely lightweight and powerful. You can use any cheap virtual machine to stream thousands of files. All you need to do is specify link to your media on remote server via WMSPanel web interface.

Protecting media links from web scraping

Security and billing are often considered as most valuable tasks for every media business. It's hard to imagine a company that doesn't care about protecting its own content, which in fact underlies company's gain. Unprotected content can be used by other people for commercial purposes and that actually means missed profit for the content owner.

WMSPanel team provides their customers with set of paywall features for Nimble Streamer and Wowza, those are dedicated to solve the above tasks. The best-known feature is hot-linking protection, which allows to protect specified links from re-streaming and further re-use. Briefly, media URL is accompanied with special signature, which contains information about IP address of viewer and period of time the URL is valid for. So, protected URL can't be used to retrieve media content from any different IP address and expires after predefined period of time. Perfect!

However sometimes, our customers report, that hot-linking protection is broken, because they've seen an application, playing their protected streams. The application's name is usually Kodi, SimpleTV or PlaylisTV, but that isn't a full list. Reported case looks like re-streaming, but in fact it's not. Those applications don't produce media URL, but scrape it from a web page, which is in most cases accessible for everyone. Roughly speaking, they act as "man-in-the-middle", requesting web page from viewer's IP address, taking URL from that page and pasting it inside its own media player.

So, nothing to worry about? Not exactly.