2019 Q1 summary

The first quarter of year 2019 brought a new product and several interesting updates by Softvelum team.

Qosifire live streaming quality monitoring service

Qosifire is a web service for monitoring live streams' availability and quality.
This is our approach to quality monitoring for a variety of streaming companies which need simple, powerful and reliable solution.

Qosifire has 3 basic components:

• Agent software is installed on customer server to check streams;
• Our web service console collects data from agents;
• Free mobile apps notify users' devices about alerts and show stats.

At the moment Qosifire supports Icecast audio streaming quality monitoring. We are working on HLS quality monitoring for video and audio - stay tuned for our updates.
As for pricing, Qosifire is a SaaS with simple and affordable cost structure.

Now let's get back to the flagship product - Nimble Streamer.

For those of our customers who are working with VOD, take a look at video discussion between Jan Ozer of Streaming Learning Center and Yury Udovichenko of Softvelum, called Dynamic packetizing: pros/cons/recipes about pros and cons of dynamic packetizing of live, VOD and DVR content. Your video comments are welcomed!

As for live streaming, you may remember that in 2017 Adobe announced they would stop Flash technology support by the end of 2020. For all live streaming companies this means the decline of RTMP end-user "last mile" streaming.
We've released an article called Get ready for Flash farewell and RTMP decline which describes the timeline for that decline and describe the alternative which our team created to solve that problem - the SLDP low latency live streaming technology. Read this article and let us know of your thoughts on this.

Meanwhile our customers keep using RTMP for "first mile" delivery of live streams, as well as for streams' transfer between origin and edge nodes of their delivery infrastructure. Using that protocol, people care about security of their delivery over public network, so we kept receiving requests for adding RTMPS (RTMP over SSL) support in our products. So we did it.

RTMPS in now supported in Nimble Streamer in all delivery modes like publish, reception and playback.
In addition, RTMPS and RTSPS are now supported in Larix Broadcaster application and mobile SDK for Android and iOS.
Moreover, RTMPS is supported in SLDP Player to allow not just secure publishing but also secure playback in case it's needed too.

Those of our live streamers who use Nimble DVR for recording and playback, might find a new API for DVR export to MP4 very convenient.

Speaking of convenience, take a look at server tags in WMSPanel. We made that for those who has big number of servers and would like to access them easier through the panel.


Last but now least, take a look at The State of Streaming Protocols for Q1 2019 with RTMP declining and HLS going up.


We'll keep you updated on our latest features and improvements. 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 - 2019 Q1

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 3800+ servers on average this quarter. WMSPanel collected data about more than 14 billion views. Total view time for our server products is nearly nearly 1.7 billion hours 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 has increased to 74% with RTMP going down to 12%. It's early to say for sure but this might be one of the first signs of shifting from RTMP due to its future decline. We'll see the progress through the year.

The State of Streaming Protocols - Q1 2019 

You may compare that to the picture of 2018 streaming protocols landscape:

Server tags in WMSPanel

WMSPanel has been the best web service for media servers reporting for many year so far. We're improving our reporting and monitoring capabilities all the time.

Following the feedback from our customers we've improved our servers management page.

Now you can assign any number of tags to each media server instance and filter them by those tags in servers list. This especially helps customers with significant number of servers to distinct them by their functions and purposes.

To define the tags for a server, go to servers list (Servers top menu). Here you can click on gear icon and select Edit item or click on server name and them click Edit on a newly opened page. You will see server details page.

The Tags edit field will allow entering multiple tags.

Once you save data, you will see server details. Once you go back to servers list, you will see new added tags as well as "All" and "No tags" items. You can click on any number of tags, this will show only those servers which have the selected tags. Clicking on "All" will reset the filter and show all servers. "No tags" will show those servers which have no tags at the moment.

We believe this will help you work with your servers more convenient.

Related documentation

WMSPanel media servers reporting