HLS support in Nimble Advertizer SSAI

Earlier this year Softvelum introduced Nimble Advertizer, the Server-Side Ads Insertion (SSAI) framework for Nimble Streamer. This framework allows dynamically insert personalized ads into live streaming content.

Key features of Advertizer are:

• Pre-roll ads per each connection
• Mid-roll ads flexible timing setup
• Per-stream ads insertion business logic
• Personalized ads based on your user IDs

Now Advertizer supports HLS live streams output in addition to currently supported RTMP, SLDP and Icecast protocols. It supports both video+audio and audio-only modes. Advertizer may use all input live protocols supported by Nimble Streamer, which are RTMP, RTSP, SRT, UDT, HLS, MPEG2TS, Icecast and SHOUTcast.

The workflow is easy to adopt within any business logic:

1. Nimble Streamer media server processes incoming streams to get the content.
2. Nimble Advertizer calls your handler web application to get business logic description.
3. Advertizer gets files with advertisements to process them via Nimble Streamer according to your logic defined via handler.
4. Nimble inserts the ads into original media and packages it into output protocol
5. End user connects to Nimble and gets the stream containing original content mixed with advertisements.
6. Playback is running smooth regardless of ads insertion over time in any player which supports the output protocol.

Live input codec for live stream for ads insertion needs to be H.264. Notice that with our Live Transcoder you may also use other live codecs. For your ads source files you need to use H.264 codec, the container needs to be the MP4 file.

You can read full technical spec here.

Nimble Advertizer Server-side Ads Insertion framework is a premium functionality which requires additional payments. Please check this page to get more details about functionality and pricing.

Take a look at this tutorial showing an easy way to insert pre-rolls into live streams:

Related documentation

Nimble Advertizer, Nimble Streamer, Live streaming features in Nimble Streamer, Live Transcoder,

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Softvelum 2018 Q2 news

In Softvelum, we are continuously improving our products and services to protect customers' data, so we've made several major updates in Q2 of 2018.

Before reading further, check the State of Streaming Protocols for Q2 2018, we've added total view time for all of customers, and it's 18 million hours watched through our server software every day!

GDPR

On May 25th, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of European Union came into effect adding new requirements for companies who may work with data of users from EU.
We have improved our products to comply with new regulation, as well as updated Privacy Policy accordingly. Please read it and let us know if you have any concerns about it.

By logging into our services you agree to our privacy policy and you give a consent to Softvelum to use your email for sending products updates like this one.

We don't send you emails very often, but from time to time we'd like to share news about our products with you.
If you'd like to avoid announcement emails, you can go to Users management page in your WMSPanel account, click on editing user information and check "Exclude user email from WMSPanel announcements" checkbox.

If you have any concerns or issues regarding your privacy in our products, please feel free to contact us via our helpdesk.

Cookies

We've also added cookies usage banner for all users who use WMSPanel website - you might have noticed it entering your account lately. It can be easily dismissed for your convenience.

If you use WMSPanel as a white label and would like this banner to appear for your users, you need to enable it. In order to keep white label look independent from Softvelum, we removed links to Softvelum privacy policy to make it neutral. If you want to control the appearance of this banner, go to Settings menu > Branding tab. For each domain you may click on gear icon to open settings dialog. There you may click on "Show cookie policy notice" checkbox to allow cookies banner for your white label users. It will have a company-neutral text, however if you'd like that banner to point to your own privacy policy, use "Privacy Policy URL" field to specify URL which will be used in banner text.

Nimble Streamer

Nimble Advertizer now supports audio-only HLS output. This means you can serve audio ads via Icecast and audio-only HLS.
You can check more about technical details on this page.

Speaking of HLS, Nimble Streamer now supports fMP4 for VOD HLS for both H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC content. It also supports ABR VOD via SMIL files. Read this article for more details.

We follow up with latest updates of operating systems and create new packages for Nimble Streamer for supported platforms. Check out new packages of Nimble Streamer for Ubuntu 18.04 and Raspbian 9.

Live Transcoder

We've made a major improvement for transcoder which now allows using shared contexts. This enhances resources usage and simplifies the fine tuning. Read this article for more details on shared contexts.

Also, take a look at Troubleshooting Live Transcoder article for various cases you may face while using Live Transcoder.

We've also added NVidia decoder deinterlacing mode, you can read more about it here.

You may also find useful a step-by-step description for wildcard ABR scenario setup.

Mobile SDKs

Larix mobile SDKs were updated to include new improvements as well as mobile playback solutions. It has a number of bugfixes and performance improvements.

You can check SDKs release notes for all updates and use this page to subscribe for SDKs.

Stay tuned for more updates and follow us at Facebook and Twitter to get latest news and updates of our products and services.

The State of Streaming Protocols - 2018 Q2

Softvelum team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols. It's based on stats from WMSPanel reporting service which handles data from Wowza Streaming Engine and Nimble Streamer servers - there were 3600+ servers on average this quarter. WMSPanel collected data about more than 13 billion views.

We've added a new metric - total view time for our server products. It's nearly 1.7 billion this quarter, or 18+ million view hours per day.

Let's take a look at the chart and numbers of this quarter:

You can see HLS share as 67% and RTMP at 17% while progressive download went down a bit.

You can compare that to the picture of Q1 streaming protocols landscape: