Wowza's New Ultra-Low Latency Streaming Platform: Who Wants In?

When #Wowza was founded in 2005, their goal was to create the tools to #deliver video and audio content seamlessly, and with greater stability and control. Twelve years and 20,000 customers later, Wowza has become the gold standard for an industry that is exploding with growth and rapidly evolving. But there are always ways to improve.

At the 2017 NAB Show, Wowza made a commitment: to bring the future of #live-#streaming through resilient, managed services that deliver #low-#latency video with industry-leading monitoring. To do this, Wowza has been developing an ultra-low latency service built on their API-driven live-video platform that provides unsurpassed scale and fast delivery to stream around the world.

So, why go to the trouble of building a new low-latency platform? Because customers have spoken: With all things being equal, they will always choose the most resilient, lowest-latency option.

In a recent survey, Wowza found 79 percent of respondents need to deliver to their customers in under 10 seconds—with many needing less than five-second or even sub-second delivery. What’s more, over 93 percent of respondents are concerned with video and metadata sync.

Why? Today’s consumers demand more than just video—and they expect applications to sync live video with data, real-time chat, captions, interactive elements and video augmentations. To deliver this at scale, developers need a platform that is built for video—and built for speed. Not smaller #HLS or #MPEG-#DASH chunk sizes, but sub-second delivery.

Wowza's new API-driven network gives content producers and application developers the power of ultra-low latency delivery, whether or not they’re streaming experts.

Speed Meets Scale, Uptime and Monitoring

Wowza's ultra-low latency platform is built on three core tenets: dynamic scalability, constant uptime and intelligent monitoring.

Building on top of a reliable, wide-reaching cloud computing infrastructure helps them achieve these goals. Their global platform intelligently detects the closest ingest point, and delivers to every continent except Antarctica. This helps reduce hops to the last mile and supercharges delivery speed—no more HLS caching across multiple hops, or egress to secondary networks.

This platform also makes it possible to stream in the highest quality available to any global audience, regardless of existing network conditions. It won’t artificially inject latency based on demand or scale. It delivers consistent user experiences around the world, with streams that start instantly, don’t buffer and rarely drop.

In the survey mentioned earlier, an overwhelming number of respondents said they need a solution that delivers world-class redundancy and stability, with auto-scaling for large events or peak viewing hours. Wowza's new network is hyper-agile, ensuring consistent uptime and predictability for computing resources. When you have high-demand events, Wowza's platform offers greater elasticity and intelligent load-balancing to meet those viewers.

Lastly, Wowza new delivery option offers real-time monitoring and self-healing capabilities. Should there be any interruptions, the platform can detect them, and roll over to the nearest available data center to maintain uptime. From ingest to playback, the platform monitors the entire streaming workflow—offering greater control and insight into the performance of your streams.