Streams failover hot swap via Live Transcoder

Nimble Streamer Live Transcoder now supports hot swap capabilities for live streaming scenarios.

This covers use cases when there is some original (primary) stream active all the time and a substitute (secondary) stream to replace it on some occasions. Those include cases like emergency stream activation and an opposite one like streams failover which is described below.

During stream failover, the substitute stream is always active and once the original stream goes down, the data from substitute stream is taken. Once the original stream is online again, it replaces the substitute stream back.

This feature requires making the swap smoothly from viewers point of view, which means a player must not stop the playback. Nimble Streamer covers this properly.

The setup is similar to emergency stream hot swap. with a few changes.

Emergency streams hot swap via Live Transcoder

Many of our customers requested us to support hot swap capabilities for live streaming scenarios.

This basically refers to use cases when there is some original (primary) stream active all the time, some substitute (secondary) stream to swap on some occasions, and either of the following actions needs to be done:

• Emergency stream activation. The substitute stream is usually inactive but when it goes live, it must replace the original stream. Once the secondary stream becomes inactive, the original stream must be continued.
• Failover stream. The substitute stream is active and once the original stream goes down, the data from substitute stream is taken. Once the original stream is back online, it replaces the substitute stream again.

Both cases require to make the swap smoothly from viewers point of view, which means a player must not stop the playback. Nimble Streamer handles both cases correctly. This article covers the first case.

Emergency stream hot swap is used for several cases, and the most notable example is the support of United States Emergency Alert System (EAS). It requires a broadcaster to replace any media with the content provided by EAS once it becomes available.

Let's take a look at the setup process of this capability.