Wowza Streaming Engine (Linux PAID)

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.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that it can take in and push out many different protocols, which makes it flexible to use in a variety of setups.

What do you dislike about the product?

The refresh and page-load rate when using stream targets.

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

It was easy to get a Wowza Streaming Media Engine instance up and running right away, and then move it into production without much hassle.

What do you like best about the product?

We have been using Wowza Streaming Engine for many years and for our self-hosted live stream it has been a robust and stable solution with no performance issues.

What do you dislike about the product?

First time setup was not easy, but we had our live stream working within a day using the provided easy to follow documentation.

Upgrading Wowza Streaming Engine with the various Java updates and installing the Streamlock certificate was a challenge, but the one and only time I contacted Wowza support the issue was sorted out within 24hrs.

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

Wowza Streaming Engine is benefiting us by being a high performance, high-quality output solution that integrates with all our other software so we can stream to global audiences.

What do you like best about the product?

I really like that the customer support is always quick and helpful, and they go beyond just a quick resolution. It's clear that they're striving for the best product to best serve their clients. Wowza Streaming Engine works well with just about every encoder type we use and integrates easily with our own custom software. The initial setup was super easy; barely an inconvenience. We started with Wowza and, though we've considered and tried other products, Wowza continues to fit our use cases the best.

What do you dislike about the product?

Enterprise authentication and SSO integration would add some strength to the platform.

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

Wowza Streaming provides a real-time, low-latency video viewing experience, solving the problem of high-latency or waiting for physical media.

What do you like best about the product?

My favorite thing about Wowza is the reliability. I never have to wonder if the service is going to work correctly...It just does.

What do you dislike about the product?

There is not a single thing that I could say negatively about Wowza.

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

We use Wowza as a delivery mechanism for our live streaming. We encode a single feed and deliver it to their servers and they handle the M3U8 adaptive bitrate playlist for us and deliver it to all the media outlets we use.