Wowza Streaming Engine (Linux PAID)

Wowza Streaming Cloud is used for indoor cameras, and the live stream is fed to Wowza Streaming Cloud. Then on the client side, a mobile app or multiple mobile apps can connect to Wowza Streaming Cloud and can see the streaming or can see the recorded videos. Wowza Streaming Cloud is basically the intermediate point where everything is stored or streamed.

As an example, there is a client, and the indoor camera which we have developed is installed in my home. When I want to see the streaming on my mobile app when I am away from home, I send the RTSP request over Wowza Streaming Cloud. Then Wowza Streaming Cloud is the one that sends the streaming request to the IoT camera, and so the streaming is started. Then, with two-way communication, the streaming is sent to Wowza Streaming Cloud, and then Wowza Streaming Cloud forwards the same live stream to the mobile app so I can see the live streaming. This is one of the use cases.

One of the normal use cases where we see users using Wowza Streaming Cloud is live streaming. There are use cases where an event happens and the user gets a notification, so the user starts the stream. We can ask Wowza Streaming Cloud to start streaming on the IoT camera, and it starts the camera, and we have the live stream. This is one of the most important use cases for Wowza Streaming Cloud because one of the good things about Wowza Streaming Cloud is that multiple clients can be connected and see the streaming. This is the normal use case we are using it for.

One thing is the security offered by Wowza Streaming Cloud. We can have TCP streaming with security, so one thing we can achieve with Wowza Streaming Cloud is that there is a lesser chance of spoofing. Another thing is that we have used TCP in the streaming, and basically, Wowza Streaming Cloud is performing well with the TCP packet. These are some of the good things. Obviously, the other thing is that in Wowza Streaming Cloud, we have the capacity to store the streams, so someone can see it when they want to see the recorded video. These are some of the good facilities.

Wowza Streaming Cloud is performing well and has positively impacted our organization. We have developed the IoT camera and the user response is good because with Wowza Streaming Cloud, when multiple clients are connected on the same camera, we are seeing good performance, and Wowza Streaming Cloud is sufficiently capable to handle the multiple clients. We are able to achieve what we want with the help of Wowza Streaming Cloud.

Wowza Streaming Cloud can be improved if it includes some latest use cases where we can integrate AI. As an example, Wowza Streaming Cloud can integrate the analytics facility in the stream so that someone does not need to develop its own AI analytics, but Wowza Streaming Cloud can provide this facility, and this will enhance the user experience.

Security is one of the aspects of Wowza Streaming Cloud that everybody wants. If the AI analytics can be run on the captured stream, there is no chance that we can breach some security protocol. The analytics result should be run with the LLM which is within the premises of Wowza Streaming Cloud, so there is no concern about the security.

We have been using Wowza Streaming Cloud for two years.

The end-users are happy with the performance of Wowza Streaming Cloud. They are seeing sufficient streaming performance when they connect with the same stream. They watch with multiple clients, such as multiple mobile devices or one mobile device and one laptop. The performance is good.

I would rate Wowza Streaming Cloud a seven on a scale of one to ten. Seven is the rating because it is sufficient as per the requirement, but I would suggest that since we have the satisfactory result, I give the seven because there is still a chance that Wowza Streaming Cloud can have more features which help to enhance the user experience.

Reliability and accuracy is one of the concerns regarding Wowza Streaming Cloud. In terms of the accuracy or the precision in terms of AI, if it provides a fifty to sixty percent result, then it is still good because none of the algorithms are perfect. If I use OpenCV or anything, the result is not always one hundred percent achievable, but with the help of AI, we can improve it gradually, starting with sixty percent accuracy.

I did purchase Wowza Streaming Cloud through the AWS Marketplace.

I would suggest that whenever you want to use Wowza Streaming Cloud, always start with the use case where the free tier version is available and then do some stress testing. When you are happy with Wowza Streaming Cloud, you can convert it to the real production scenario and use it. I would rate this product a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

High reliability, simple usage. I know I can rely on it to work for most customers without having to do lots of technical support.

What do you dislike about the product?

It feels like it's behind the times on features. YouTube has been able to do inline DVR forever, but I still can't do this on my streams. I'd love to be able to allow for customers to rewind to earlier in the day, even if it's only an hour or so.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It doesn't seem like they're really working on anything that helps me at the moment. The last announcement was about AI watching the stream, and the system should really already have some kind of alerts for stream outages, but it does not.

What do you like best about the product?

Wowza is a solid, capable platform for delivering streaming to our customers, and it handles our day to day needs well. It gets the core job done reliably, and it's clear the product keeps maturing over time, with steady improvements showing up along the way.

What do you dislike about the product?

Documentation is a real weak spot, especially around High Availability. When we were setting up HA, we struggled to find any real guidance. There was no clear documentation explaining how Wowza actually behaves in an HA setup, so we ended up piecing it together ourselves through trial and error. I'd also love to see Wowza invest in publicly available training videos, something like a full walkthrough of setting the product up from scratch, plus other common scenarios people run into. If resources like that existed, I think more people would feel confident deploying the product instead of getting stuck early.

Troubleshooting is another pain point. Wowza typically runs on a VM, and when something goes wrong it's genuinely hard to investigate quickly. If you open a support ticket, by the time someone responds the issue has often already gone away on its own, so you're left waiting for it to happen again just to grab logs and dig into what's going on.

We also had a couple of issues that never got a real resolution. Support offered workarounds, try this, try that, but we never actually landed on a root cause. There are still a fair number of bugs in the product, though it does feel like it's maturing over time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We rely on Wowza to power streaming for our customers, so it's essentially the backbone of that part of our service. It handles the core streaming delivery reliably enough that we can build our customer facing offering on top of it. The main gap is on the operational side, better documentation and faster ways to diagnose issues would let us support our own customers more confidently, especially in HA setups.

What do you like best about the product?

Our development team able to automate most of our standard streaming processes. Reliability is important.

What do you dislike about the product?

It has been buggy. Sometimes MP4 conversions fail. Sometimes videos unpublish themselves.

Also, streaming to alternate sources, such as social media platforms and/or YouTube, is cumbersome.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Live streaming events and maintaining our video library.

What do you like best about the product?

It is configurable via xml files and runs on a linux platform.
It provides reliable streams at medium and low usage levels.

What do you dislike about the product?

The in-place software upgrade is awful. It can result in broken features as old configuration files are not parsed for deprecated or removed settings/syntax and other aspects of on disk storage are not updated to match the expectation of the new software version. Files and directories are named very poorly during the upgrade. Lots of manually discover or repair is required.
Under heavy load the entire server can crash with a out of memory error. There is no obvious attempt to mitigate this problem; all your streams die.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Provides a platform to distribute multiple live streams and a library of VODs.

What do you like best about the product?

By far, the best streaming solution, reliable and well maintained.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing, sometime UI performance can be a little sluggish when handling lots of endpoints

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are producing live events distributed to multiple plaftorms, Wowza let's us handle this efficiently without any hiccups.

What do you like best about the product?

Reliable overall—once it’s configured, it just works.

What do you dislike about the product?

It lacks an easy way to configure things like FPS, and it would really benefit from a simple, user-friendly GUI.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It connects to camera systems that have extra data embedded in the stream. Wowza can be configured to ignore it.

What do you like best about the product?

We use wowza streaming for over 15 years in production and it is working very stable and live streaming is working on all platforms without any problems all that time. Now we have 3 physical servers and largest live stream on one server was with over 2.000 concurrent clients.

What do you dislike about the product?

We have sometimes lot's of concurrent live streams with small number of clients (up to 100) and we are still looking for smooth solution on how to do load balancing all this streams over 3 physical servers.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Wowza allows us to provide live streaming services to users (primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities) in Slovenia.

What do you like best about the product?

Wowza is a very powerful and secure all-in-one streaming solution that’s also easy to use.

What do you dislike about the product?

I think it’s a bit expensive. I’m working for a client and providing them a Wowza-based media streaming solution, but the pricing is still a bit concerning.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I am a freelancer, and I always recommend Wowza to my clients who want the best media streaming solution.

What do you like best about the product?

The best thing that I like is that the flexibility to add our custom code so that we override some of the functions and achieve some output in a different or customised way. For example extracting the HLS, CMAF chunks using their PushPublishHTTPCupertino class so that we can easily upload these chunks to S3 or whatever storage.

What do you dislike about the product?

The most irritating part is when we reach out to their customer support. Even for a simple issue they keep asking all the config and log files for review. But I don't know if they really spend to review all these files or if they really use these files to reproduce the issue on their side. Basically, dealing with their support person sometimes really becomes tedious. Also it is really difficult to convince them about the bug that we identify in Wowza. Another thing is sometimes it happens that with their new releases they keep adding the bugs in a workflow, which was working fine in their previous versions and that becomes really frustrating. And they keep insisting us to upgrade to their latest versions, which is not possible everytime when we have it running in the production systems. Every now and them we can not spend time to test their latest versions and push it to production.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

They really solves the end-to-end video streaming problems when it comes to different types of protocols. As said previously the flexibility or the control that we get to add our custom code module benefits us a lot, which is really difficult when we chose to work with other streaming services.