Recap of 2020: NDI, Low Latency HLS, DRM, SRT, RIST, Larix Broadcaster and more

The year of 2020 is over and our team is glad to wish you a Happy New Year!

Despite everything that happened this year, our team kept moving forward and improving our products.

So let us show you briefly what we have accomplished this year. You could find more details and minor updates in our earlier newsletters and social media so here we'll just point to significant ones.

Nimble Streamer

Low Latency HLS

Apple Low Latency HLS is the next generation of Apple's HTTP Live Streaming protocol created to achieve latency of around three seconds. Nimble Streamer now supports LL HLS and it generates the output stream according to the latest spec.
Read LLHLS setup and usage article which includes video tutorial. Currently the output plays only on Apple platforms and via THEOPlayer. You can watch our sample stream on their LLHLS demo page.

DRM on board

Nimble Streamer now has full support for DRM. Our customers can protect their live streams, DVR and VOD output by encrypting them with Widevine, Playready and FairPlay. Key management can be done via BuyDRM, EZDRM, Pallycon and Verimatrix. Visit DRM feature set page to learn more about setup and usage.
DRM is available as part of our Addenda premium package. It covers DRM, Advertizer and a set of other premium features.

More protocols

NDI support was added into Nimble Streamer. It allows receiving NDI input for transcoding it into any supported output protocols, as well as turning any input stream into the NDI output. This is extremely useful for live production teams. Read NDI setup article to learn more and watch video tutorial to see it in action.

SRT protocol feature set had a break-through this year among our customers. We saw it gaining a huge momentum across the industry. And our team also improved our implementation in Nimble Steamer this year:

• SRT Publisher Assistance Security Set (SRT PASSet) is our new security and management framework for SRT. It allows processing incoming streamid, making per-server, per-application and per-stream authentication, managing published streams and more. Read framework overview in this article to see what it can do for you.
• In addition, we've added SRT playback protection to Paywall feature set and added playback stats for WMSPanel.

Read more about how Softvelum products implement SRT.

RIST is another technology which we've added this year. This is a new protocol for reliable streaming over UDP, you can read more about its advantages on RIST forum website. Nimble Streamer supports RIST in Push, Pull and Listen modes.

SLDP low latency protocol was another streaming technology that we improved. Synchronized playback on multiple devices became available as part of all SLDP implementations. You can stream simultaneously from Nimble Streamer to SLDP Player on HTML5 web page, Android and iOS for better user experience. View video demonstration of this feature in action, you'll love it.

If you build big infrastructures based on Nimble Streamer and WMSPanel, you will also like slice-wide permissions which you can use for assigning any group of non-admins to any group of servers, in order to give them a specific set of permissions for controlling Nimble instances.

Improving Transcoder 

Nimble Live Transcoder was also improved significantly this year with a bunch of sophisticated features:

• Create transcoding pipelines based only on NVENC hardware acceleration.
• Create Intel Quick Sync-only pipelines too.
• FFmpeg custom builds are now supported to allow using additional libraries that are not supported by Transcoder at the moment.
• Transcoder control API is available for those who need more flexibility.

More media

You may find interesting these articles mentioning the usage of Nimble Streamer in complex scenarios:

• Riot Games Keeps League of Legends Workflow: this production model relies on vMix, AWS, NDI, Nimble, and other cloud-based tools.
• The largest VALORANT production to date: a streaming infrastructure with Nimble Streamer in it.
• SRT Alliance team posted Glass-to-Glass Delivery with SRT: The Softvelum Way article about building delivery pipeline with Softvelum products.
  

Side note: we've started producing video tutorials on various subjects, e.g. Nimble on Amazon EC2: installation and SRT setup. Check our YouTube channel to see more and subscribe if you want to get new videos as soon as they arrive.

Larix Broadcaster and mobile streaming

This year Larix Broadcaster had a huge increase in usage.

Larix was mentioned in a few articles on SVG News:

• NFL Draft 2020: NFL Media Deploys iPhone Production Kits - exciting overview of the Draft virtual infrastructure.
• NFL Draft Reflections gives some details, including SRT usage.
• MLB Draft 2020: MLB Network Embraces Virtual Event - another great use case of virtual production.

You can find more links, including industry leaders mentioning Larix, on our documentation reference.

This year we've put significant efforts into the quality control of mobile solutions. Softvelum apps now pass through a series of tests before being released into production. We've published our basic description of connectivity testing to demonstrate the most important aspect of that.

If you subscribe to any of our mobile SDK you can be sure you get a properly tested solution.

Before we go on to the features from past year, we'd like to share an awesome upcoming update.

• Talkback provides audio return feed from the studio back to the mobile streamer. You can get feedback via SRT (all receiver modes), RTMP, SLDP and Icecast.
• Besides Talkback, Larix Broadcaster will support publishing via SRT Listen and SRT Rendezvous modes.
• To use these features right now, join Beta program in Google Play, and use this link to install it via TestFlight on iOS. Let us know how it works for you.

As for major Larix Broadcaster functionality, we've added plenty of major and minor 

updates, including more RTMP authentication compatibility with servers and services, audio-only mode, streaming pause, RIST streaming and more. We also introduced Larix Grove, a simple format which allows distributing streaming setup details across mobile devices.

Larix Player is the new name of our playback solution formerly known as "SLDP Player" which is available on Android, iOS, Android TV and tvOS. It can play SRT in Caller, Listen and Rendezvous modes, RTMP, SLDP, Icecast, HLS and MPEG-DASH.

SDK release notes has a list of all significant features added this year.

Also, we created mobile products playlist on YouTube to show our own video tutorials. Check SRT to OBS from Larix tutorial as an example.

That's it for now.

Our team wishes you a Happy New Year and we'll see you in 2021!

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