In the last newsletter we discussed Content Delivery Networks, and what considerations one must make.
Of course, it would all depend on what use you need to make of it, and on your budgetary constraints.
Tantrwm, have chosen the ones we think are best suited for our needs, which are ease of deployment, reliability and of course, pricing.
Here they are, in their fullest glory (best one last):
4) YOUTUBE:
Since youtube launched its live event broadcast option, many people have adopted it for their live streaming, making it a very popular consumer platform. And indeed, it would be a very appealing option for commercial broadcast, being free and ubiquitous, as the youtube brand can be. We like it, but only as an alternative to Twitch, for game broadcast and other personal uses.
The main issue with it, in my view, is that the interface for live event broadcast isn’t user friendly or pro looking enough, and that YT appear to have a very solid Content Protection system in place, so that in case you’re live streaming let’s say, a cover band playing famous tunes at a local town festival, chances are your stream is GOING DOWN pretty sharpish!! so, yeah.
3) USTREAM:
We think the guys at Ustream have done a marvellous job of their CDN. And the website, and the interface, and the ease of use, and most other things to boot. The only BIG con in this instance is the price. The free version handles most content and plays fine, but the ads, banner adverts and little or no customisation make it a rather unappealing prospect for commercial use. The paid for option can go from as low as $99 a month, BUT with quite a few restrictions in place (such as limited video storage space, limited ad-free broadcast time, and no branding control) or they can be as high as $2500 a month, fully loaded, but making it unpalatable to small businesses which cannot realistically recoup the outlay on only a handful of jobs.
In our daily operations, we have opted to use a free Ustream channel as a backup to our main infrastructure, set up and ready in case all else fails.
2) WOWZA STREAMING CLOUD
OK, now we’re cooking on gas!! These guys, despite a couple of occasional glitches in the interface and their tech support team being on US Eastern Time (So forget early morning troubleshooting if, like us, you are in the UK), have got the whole package sorted.
Easy to set up, relatively cheap and without any big fixed costs.
They offer multi-bitrate, multi-device transcoding, they deliver the video stream in a lot of different stream formats, AND they even create and host a webpage for your stream on their own server and embed a video player in it for you to sit back, pop that prosecco open, chillout, and enjoy.
All the stream monitoring happens online, and it ingests content from a silly amount of different devices. If it wasn’t for the fact that sometimes, in some venues, we found ourselves unable to access the in-house network from our Teradek encoders and output to the Cloud (due to crazy token validation systems or other IT issues) this would be without a doubt our preferred streaming option, rising way above the rest.
AND THE WINNER IS:
LIVESTREAM.COM
This is (and has been for years) the gold standard in Live Video Streaming.
Particularly as far as small and medium sized enterprises are concerned.
There are many advantages to the Livestream platform, and the cons are somehow negligible, particularly in its most recent incarnation, aptly named ‘New Livestream’.
It is fully customizable (in a ‘white label’ kind of way) for total brand control, and its network can be accessed via a wonderful little desktop application called Procaster (renamed Producer in ‘New Livestream’) which makes the whole ingestion experience as easy as Plug n’ Play. Beware though, you may have to tweak the bitrate encoding settings while using Livestream’s desktop app, as it can become quite taxing on your CPU during the encoding process (which happens locally) and mess up with your broadcast if the usage exceeds 80%.
Thankfully, the anti-lag feature will make good of any temporary mishap.
Price is good-ish, but it gets better and better as you get closer to the end of the month, as they have a calendar month pricing schedule, meaning that if you buy a Pro channel on the 29th April, you only pay until the 30th!!
Cheers to that!!
