Wowza Streaming Engine (Linux BYOL)

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.

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.