Live Stream

We have live streaming on our wishlist, but haven't scheduled a date for implementing it. It's not a much-requested feature. I'll add a +1 for it though.

We're interested in livestreaming to.

OK, thanks for the request. Good to hear which features people are most interesting in.

It would be great if live streaming was implemented in BotR!

+2 for livestreaming. The more video we implement at my company, the more people are asking for live streaming.

We'll keep this on the shortlist. Not sure yet if we'll set this up ourselves or if we'll partner with e.g. Livestream.com

another one for live streaming, It would be great to get both services in one place.

OK, so it looks like we have to figure this one out fast.

Another question: do you want us to record and store this live stream or do you always plan to upload an edited version of the event later on?

I think having the option to record would be a nice feature. My company hosted a 2-hour forum the other night which, in the future, we plan to live stream. Given that instance I probably would have relied on the camera to record the event, but in the instance of a webinar via webcam or something to that effect, having BOTR handle the recording would be ideal.

The capability to do live streaming would make your BOTR very interesting for my team (and I suspect, many others). It might be too late for our current project, but I nonetheless hope that this feature will be integrated into BOTR in the near future.

Another one for live streaming.

Livestream yes! Livestream yes! ;) We have some big companies asking for it too. We used livestream.com but are totally disappointed with their support and the studio isn't also very well made.

So.. go for it guys. We're waiting for it ;)

YES! We want live streams. Would it be possible to schedule so it can appear as a live stream even though it is prerecorded, but say, ie. at 2:00 a specific program will play?

Martin: Our <a rel="no follow" href="http://www.bitsontherun.com/tutorials/mimicking-lineair-tv/">mimicking linear tv</a> tutorial does what you need.

@Martin: with a little bit of javascripting, this can actually already be achieved. Take a look at our<a rel="no follow" href="http://www.bitsontherun.com/tutorials/mimicking-lineair-tv/">Mimiching Lineair TV tutorial</a> for more info.

Livestream.com do not play well outside US (there are using amazonaws as CDN ), so if you want to stream to the rest of the world., I suggest BOTR partner with Highwinds for live streaming, since you already using them for RTMP on-demand streaming.

Any news about implementing live streaming in BOTR? Roadmap?
Regards.

Can't wait until this feature is implemented.

:-)

We're still holding off on this one for now, but it's on the roadmap for Q4.

We have been encouraging BoTR LIVE for a while. We need a consolidated platform for live and vod streams. We broadcast 6-8 hours live per week which is also recorded on the streaming server and then uploaded to BoTR - this is a real overhead in the workflow and we need to remove it.

Yes we are in dire need of this too. Will mean we can keep all our business with BoTR and don't have to go to other sites. Please try and get this up ASAP

I showed interest in this over a year ago and nothing has happened so don't hold your breath

Another vote for live streaming. It would be nice to give users a similar experience for live events as for VOD with BOTR. Right now we have to send them to another site, and it's all a bit messy.

Hi,

For live streaming, I think DaCast (www.dacast.com) will be another good option for you. The platform integrates channel manager which allow you to stream live content and also VOD by creating your own video playlist. In addition, you can decide how you monetize your video, DaCast offers PPV, subsription or advertising for you to choose. Last but not the least, the company provides an analytic report for you to know your viewers and monitor your spending as well.

I'm writing a proposal for a very big job and if live streaming was supported LongTail would be PERFECT for it. Please implement this soon.

+2 for live streaming!

Come on BOTR! This thread has been going for one and a half years and still no action on live streaming. Please get it up and working soon it would be much appreciated.

We totally understand this is item #1 on most people's wish list. We are continously doing work on this behind the scenes. However, it is still not possible to offer live streaming in an easy to use, self served way. Here are the issues we are trying to get resolved:

DESKTOP TOOL

There is no decent, cheap, crossplatform uploading/ingestion tool for live streaming. The tool that comes most close is Adobe FMLE. It is free and available for both MAC & PC, but it has no PIP support (e.g. for showing both a camera and a desktop) and is super-technical (settings for bitrates, rtmp server, etc etc).

There is also TeleStream Wirecast. This tool is nicer (it can show camera + desktop), but a lot more expensive ($450). That's about what the average BOTR customer spends a year.

Building a tool ourselves is not really an option. We're not desktop software people (let alone desktop software + USB/Firewire connectivity), so we won't be able to do a good job there. Having something develop by a freelancer also makes no sense; it will slow down development as we integrate more features and cost us a fortune.

STREAMING

None of the CDNs currently offer a solution for streaming simultaneously to Flash and iDevices. We believe that iDevice streaming must be part of our offering. The Wowza Media servers can do this, but CDNs all run Adobe FMS servers (who cannot).

In addition to this, the FMS streaming servers have proven to be very unstable for live streaming. Lots of disconnects and very slow response times (or stream interrupts) with DVR. The various HTTP streaming protocols that are currently under development seem to solve these issues, but again no CDN supports that to date.

We are constantly talking to the various CDNs to see what can be done (on either the CDN or the player side) to end up with a simple, scaleable HTTP streaming solution that spans both Flash and iDevices.

OTHER

There are some other issues we have to get resolved, though these are less of a problem. For example, live adaptive streaming is possible, but works in a weird way today. The ingestion tools actually have to deliver the multiple bitrates. It'd be better (for bandwidth / ease of use) if the ingestion tools offer one bitrate and the servers would down-transcode the live stream for viewers that don't have the bandwidth/cpu to watch the full stream.

All in all, we are absolutely looking into this feature, but have not found an easy to use, scaleable solution just yet.

In my post, the first of this thread, I mentioned TeleStream Wirecast but also Vidblaster, this starts in 130Eur.

You've mentioned Wowza Media, it's available something called "Wowza Media Server 2 for Amazon EC2", I don't know if it helps the goal of you implementing live stream, but anyway see here: http://www.wowzamedia.com/ec2.html

Yes, VidBlaster is an interesting tool. Unfortunately, it's WIN only while a lot of video producers are on MACs. But we'll keep an eye on this tool.

And we're indeed also testing with Wowza for EC2. Expect a blogpost on it to pop up next week, explaining how to quickly host a live event using this + JW Player. Wowza for EC2 could be an option for us, especially if we can get adaptive streaming support in our player and deliver the Wowza streams through Cloudfront HTTP.

AWS announced "live HTTP streaming for Amazon CloudFront" yesterday (19 April). Could someone from the team put this announcement into perspective on BoTR and live streaming? Thanks.

We won't use this feature for BOTR. First, it requires us to manage a whole stack of software (see the tutorial they released) ourselves. Second, it's only HTTP streaming (not RTMP), which means the ~20% of users that run Flash Player 10.0 cannot see the video. Third, it's only HTTP Flash streaming, which means iPad/iPhone users won't be able to run the streams.

We're still researching how we can use Wowza EC2, or a Wowza service on another CDN. That seems to be the best option to pursue.

Thanks Jeroen. Your clear, valid points against Amazon CloudFront live HTTP streaming make Wowza a clear winner in my mind, thanks for explaining. More so, after I tried and experienced how it's a stretch to deploy and use their stack -- for me the most confusing part was to set up a special CNAME via Route 53.

In contrast, when I followed your recent tutorial on Wowza EC2 live streaming, I was able to get up and running rather quickly.

However, as w/ any new tech there is the learning curve. 2 obvious needs beyond your tutorial.
- Automatic recording of the live stream (I guess recording straight into a S3 bucket tied to BotR would be too much to ask at this point..? :)
- Reliable viewer analytics for the live streams (crucial to turn this into biz offering). I feel 1st thing to try would be Cacti that comes w/ Wowza or are there maybe better approaches?

But maybe most importantly -- could you possibly reveal anything on your roadmap for bringing live into BotR offering? If you could do it, say, in 1-2 months, we could wait and avoid the costs involved in getting to know Wowza ourselves. Thanks.

Uploading a live stream directly into a BOTR bucket is quite hard indeed. Perhaps you could build a script that's running on the Wowza server and pushed the stream to BOTR using our API.

I don't know a lot about viewer analytics using Wowza. Guess Cacti would indeed be the way to get started.

BOTR live streaming won't be there in the near term (Q3/Q4 this year). We will add some other interesting features (e.g. YouTube sync), but the big projects we planned are around scaling and reliability (transcoding, contentserving).

After some digging in Wowza site, I feel that for getting recorded streams to S3 automagically, "S3FS" is probably the keyword for further exploration (http://ux.lc/oiOiXh).

While I surely (have to) check out Cacti while learning to use Wowza, with JW / BotR player the obvious next thing to test is how your GA plugin plays with live streams. Maybe you already have some insight on that? (I wonder how it didn't occur to me last time :)

Then there's the scaling. You suggest in your Wowza EC2 live streaming tutorial, CloudFront integration would allow for "massive audience". In a later comment on tute page you also explain how to do that, but too briefly for a streaming / CDN rookie like me. E.g. in a recent test I used your not-quite-finished-yet livestream plugin to set up Flash + iOS livestreaming from Wowza and got it working well. However, I'm not sure how to continue from there to have the streams served via CF.

In my mind there's also business side to that -- could CF caching mean I can use smaller'n'cheaper Wowza instance to livestream to "massive audience"?

When I throw in my wish to do adaptive livestreaming, i.e. to have multiple streams w/ different output quality and the player to pick among them and serve one based on user's connection capability, the whole topic starts to really get over my rookie head..

I know your time is very limited (guess we're all in that place), but elaborating on those livestreaming "next steps" would be very much appreciated, be it here in forums or maybe even as a part 2 to your excellent earlier tutorial. Thanks.

I don't know how our GAPro plugin would work together with live streams - good point. I presume the # of video plays are reported correctly (since these get stored on start), but the time played is not (since that's based off the video duration, where live has no duration). All ancillary stuff like geo, uniques, devices and such will all get reported correctly too.

As for your question on Wowza + CF, let me indeed look into doing a second tutorial. The short answer is:

1) use the Apple HLS support in Wowza, which renders playlists/fragments
2) make sure these playlists/fragments are distributed through CloudFront
3) use the JW Player to play these HLS streams in both Flash and iOS.

As you say, this is likely much too short, so let me look into writing this down in a more detailed blogpost.

Im also interested in Live Streaming

Live streaming interests me, too.

We just had a webcast over two hours long with about 3000 viewers using another service, but we're limited to a 500kbps stream, which produces less than desirable results, whoever it was available on flash and iOS devices.

Live streaming interests me, too. :)

add another +1