Publishing RTMP to Limelight CDN

Our customers use Nimble Streamer for building live streaming networks with their own infrastructure. However there are cases when some external CDN needs to be used to provide additional geo coverage and off-load your network during peak hours or extraordinary events.

Thus we added Limelight CDN RTMP publishing support in Nimble Streamer. It's based on RTMP re-publishing scenario with a few additional steps. With Limelight RTMP republishing you can reach broader audience within just a few clicks.

If you are looking for Limelight Realtime Streaming service RTMP re-publishing setup, please go to Limelight Realtime Streaming Guide section 3.2.1 for full information.

Here is the setup instruction.

Set up incoming stream

We assume you've already installed Nimble Streamer and you're familiar with live streaming setup process.

If you're not, please check installation instructions for your platform and also read these how-tos to transmux the incoming stream using various protocols as input:

• Published RTMP
• Pulled RTMP
• Pulled HLS
• Pulled and published RTSP
• MPEG-TS via UDP and HTTP
• Icecast/SHOUTcast

Same re-packaging engine is used in all scenarios so whatever protocol you use as input, you'll get all supported streams as output. This includes RTMP which can be played via public URL as well as re-published to any destination.

Once you follow one of the mentioned scenarios, you'll get your stream ready for re-publishing to Limelight.

Set up re-publishing to Limelight

Go to Nimble Streamer -> Live streams settings menu. To see live streaming setup UI. Choose Republishing tab.

Now click on Add Limelight RTMP button to see the dialog below.

Here you need to fill the fields:

• Source application - this is a source app
• Source Stream - this is a source stream Nimble already has
• Destination address and Port, then Destination application and Destination Stream as defined by Limelight
• Authorization schema will be set to "Limelight"
• Login and Password your Limelight login/password

Saving these changes you'll see new entry in the list.

That's it. Once you start restreaming you'll get the stream in the CDN. Check your output stream URLs provided by Limelight.

Other useful features

You can see some other examples of RTMP republishing:

• Re-publishing in Nimble Streamer
• Streaming to Facebook Live
• Streaming to YouTube
• Streaming to Periscope
• Publishing to Akamai CDN
• Publishing to Edgecast CDN
• Re-publishing to Wowza with proper authentication and ModuleSecureURLParams module.

You may also consider re-publishing incoming RTMP streams with inserted ads. Nimble Advertizer provides a framework for inserting pre-roll and mid-roll ads into live streams for further output via RTMP, SLDP and Icecast with custom business logic and per-user ads. So if you create RTMP stream with ads insertion and pull it for further re-publishing, you can provide your target CDN with properly sponsored content.
Visit Advertizer web page to find out more about server-side ads insertion functionality.

If you need to change the outgoing content in any way, like change the bitrate, use our Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer to transform. It has high performance and low resource usage.

For other live streaming scenarios, check our live streaming use cases.

Having that, you can create flexible delivery chains using Nimble Streamer for media hubs and WMSPanel for easy-to-use control panel. Install Nimble Streamer if you still haven't done that and contact us if your streaming scenarios need any updates of described functionality.

Related documentation

Live Streaming features, Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer, RTMP feature set, Build streaming infrastructure with Nimble Streamer,