March 31, 2016

March updates

Match has just a few updates while we're working on the next breakthrough features. However some of these news are highly awaited by our customers.

As always, first check the State of Streaming Protocols for March. HLS has increased its share again while RTMP and RTSP go down.

Larix Broadcaster application has updates. Android app now has portrait mode and both iOS and Android may now perform flipping front/back camera. You can download it now and try it on your device. Larix sources and the streaming library are part of mobile broadcasting SDK which is available for licensing with affordable prices.

Unique visitors stats reporting is now available in WMSPanel. You can see that metric for data slices and for each file per stream in Deep stats. Unique users are calculated within 24-hours range.
Speaking of Deep stats update, we're glad to announce they are now available for streamed slices in addition to application-based slices. It's available for both Nimble Streamer and Wowza.
Both features give wider capabilities to understand your audience better than ever.

Time-shifted playback is now part of Nimble Streamer DVR feature set. This is typically required by companies which perform live streaming for audiences in different timezones. So now it's in our product, feel free to try.

One of our customers succeeded to install Nimble Streamer on OrangePi hardware. You can use Raspbian OS installation package to do that.

As our customers know, WMSPanel is a web UI for Nimble Streamer. It allows controlling streaming scenarios by clicking just a few links. We're continuously improving control capabilities and this month we updated several features to work with multiple instances:

ABR multiple edit: define ABR outgoing streams for multiple incoming streams via test edit;
MPEG-TS out multiple edit: importing a number of incoming MPEGTS streams, you now have an ability to create multiple output streams;
Tasks control - having a big number of tasks in a panel, you may start and stop multiple tasks at once.

BTW, you can also use API to control Nimble behavior in addition to web UI.

The State of Streaming Protocols - March 2016

WMSPanel team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols.

The metrics calculations are based on nearly 3 billion views. The stats are collected from 2600+ media servers (Nimble Streamer and Wowza).

Protocols share remain stable, i.e. HLS share is about 75%, while RTMP and RTSP share decreased significantly.

The State of Streaming Protocols March, 2016.

You can compare that to February stats below.

Time-shifted streaming with Nimble Streamer DVR

As you already know, live streaming features set of Nimble Streamer includes DVR - recording and playback capabilities for live streams. It takes RTMP, RTSP, MPEG-TS, Icecast or SHOUTcast as input and gives HLS and MPEG-DASH as output.

The recording setup is easy and it's described in this article.

The playback is also simple and you can just modify usual playback URL to get recorded stream.
E.g. if your stream has this URL

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist.m3u8

then your playback URL for DVR is

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_dvr.m3u8

You may also modify URL to access certain time range like this:

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_dvr_range-1447069728-120.m3u8

where you set the start time and duration.

The URLs above will work for default MPEG2TS container. If you'd like use fMP4 container for DVR playback, you'll need to use "fmp4" suffix like this:

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_fmp4_dvr_range-1447069728-120.m3u8

Adding that suffix will create DVR stream with fMP4 container.
Both MPEG2TS and fMP4 DVR streams can be played simultaneously. So you can provide your users with appropriate URLs depending on their device type.

Timeshift

Now, in addition to time range, we introduce time-shifted playback.
Timeshift allows streaming recorded content from selected time spot and allows setting the maximum depth of selection.
Common format is as follows:

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_dvr_timeshift-<shift>-<depth>.m3u8

Where shift is a value of time shift in seconds and depth is an optional parameter setting possible length which a viewer can rewind.
A few examples are provided below.

Thus shifts time to 1 hour and allows 1 minute frame for rewind:

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_dvr_timeshift-3600-60.m3u8

This shifts to 2 hours and give 2 minutes frame:

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_dvr_timeshift-7200-120.m3u8

And this shifts playback by 7 hours:

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_dvr_timeshift-25200.m3u8

Just as in previous case of time range, if you'd like to use fMP4 container, your URL would have "fmp4" particle, like this:

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_fmp4_dvr_timeshift-7200-120.m3u8

It ill also work along with default MPEG2TS container.

Thumbnails

You may also use specific URL to get thumbnails for DVR stream.

Take a look at this video tutorial to get familiar with DVR most useful features.

Read other documentation articles for more details and full description of available options.

Also notice that HLS DVR streams can be added to SLDP HTML5 Player for rewinding low latency streams. Read this article for details.

If you have any feedback or questions about DVR, just let us know about it.

March 8, 2016

Unique visitors metric in WMSPanel

When streaming live or VOD, any content provider needs some major metrics like views count, traffic, geography etc. One of the most anticipated stats is unique visitors count. As WMSPanel is a reporting panel for streamers, we also added this metric into our bundle.

In WMSPanel, a "visitor" is considered unique for a pair of IP address and user agent utilized during 1 day. WMSPanel allows collecting stats from many servers' instances so if a viewer was watching videos from different servers, this viewer will be counted as one visitor.

There are 2 levels of reporting for unique visitors.

First one is a data slice which is a subset of statistics for a subset of servers, applications or streams including unique visitors stats. This allows sharing the stats with non-admins via white-label panel web UI. Any slice can be enabled with unique visitors count.
Another level is per-streams and per-files unique visitors via Deep stats. That feature set gives ability for per-stream and per-file statistics. Each stream or file may have its own set of daily stats including unique visitors. Visitors are unique within each stream or file.

Unique visitors metrics require space and processing power so it's a premium feature. The cost is calculated using peak number of unique visitors in any single day during a month. Unique visitors count is defined by packages.
S package = 200,000 peak unique visitors = 5 USD per month
M package = 1,000,000 peak unique visitors = 25 USD per month

The package is related both to a slice and to a deep stat package of a slice.
If some slice or Deep stats use more that 1M visitors, then several M packages are purchased.

Here are some examples of the pricing:

You have Full data slice with Deep stats enabled. Your slice peak visitors count is 100K, (i.e. S package) and Deep stats unique visitors are 150K (another S package). Your cost will be 5 USD for slice and5 USD for Deep, which is 10 USD per month total.
You have Full data slice and 5 slice where you enabled unique visitors. One of the slices has Deep enabled, with unique visitors. Full slice has 1,800,000 peak visitors (2 * M packages, 2*25 USD), each of the slices has 50,000 peak visitors (5 * S packages, 5 * 5 USD), Deep stats have 250,000 peak visitors (1 * M package, 25 USD). Total cost will be 100 USD per month.

You can find those details in our feature main page on our website.

Let us know if you have any questions on this or other features.

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