Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced Gains More Than 1,000 Beta Customers

Wowza Media Systems®, the media server software company, announced that more than 1,000 beta customers are using a preview release of its Wowza Media Server® 2 Advanced software, including numerous customers who have already deployed Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced servers in production networks.

Among the first production deployments was global CDN Mirror Image Internet, which launched a Wowza-powered multi-protocol video delivery service for Flash®, iPhone™ and other desktop and mobile clients. In addition to content delivery networks like Mirror Image, Wowza has seen a surge in adoption of its new server from online TV platforms and television broadcasters.

Early adopter Livestation, an online destination for global TV and radio news, is using Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced to offer live broadcasts from international channels like BBC World News, C-SPAN, Deutsche Welle, euronews and others to viewers on multiple screens – the iPhone, desktop and other devices.

“Wowza is changing the way the business of online video content delivery is conducted and is doing so in a way that generates value across the entire content delivery chain,” said Matteo Berlucchi, CEO, Livestation. “Whether you are an online TV platform like us or a content creator, the power and flexibility of the Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced cannot be ignored. And at the end of the day, that enables us to bring quality content to the everyday consumer on any device – a strong value proposition for our customers as well as our viewers.”

Spanish national broadcast channel laSexta and a UK-based TVCatchup, an online TV platform delivering over 30 channels from broadcaster like BBC, Sky and Virgin, have deployed Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced for concurrent Flash and iPhone streaming.

“Wowza gave us a unified streaming platform that greatly simplified our infrastructure and gave us tremendous competitive and cost advantage,” commented Guillermo Revuelta, systems engineer, laSexta. “The combination of these capabilities along with Wowza’s incredible customer support is what makes all the difference. I can’t think of television streaming without it going forward.”

“The Wowza unified workflow architecture is a real breakthrough,” said Nick Parr, co-founder, TVCatchup. “The ability to serve multiple client technologies from one streaming platform has greatly improved our market reach. As demand for our service continues to soar, Wowza remains our first and indeed the only choice for media servers.”

Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced is the world’s first multi-protocol unified media streaming platform to provide media properties, service providers, enterprises and other organizations the ability to deliver video to the three most popular digital screens – computer, mobile phone, and IPTV set-top boxes – without the need for costly investments in separate client-specific technologies for the encoding, storage and delivery.

“Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced provides a dramatic shift towards a democratization of video that is focused on the needs of all involved in the content delivery value chain, from creators to consumers. Instead of locking the industry into special-interest media platforms, protocols and players, Wowza 2 Advanced provides a unified platform for content delivery to multiple players” said Dave Stubenvoll, CEO and co-founder, Wowza Media Systems. “Built on the proven Wowza Media Server platform currently deployed by more than 30,000 licensees worldwide, Wowza 2 Advanced is the first media server software to truly unify streaming capabilities in a simple delivery workflow.” 



The Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced has been named a finalist in the category of Best Streaming Innovation by the readers of Streaming Media magazine. The winner will be announced on November 19 at the Readers' Choice Awards reception at the Streaming Media West/Online Video Platform event in San Jose, CA. A live demonstration of Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced will be conducted at Wowza Media booth number 527.

Limelight Networks Provides Mobile Services for MLB.com

Limelight Networks, Inc. announced that since the start of the Major League Baseball (MLB) season, the company has provided mobile audio streaming services to MLB Advanced Media for the award-winning MLB.com At Bat 2009 application offered on the iPhone and iPod touch.

“Limelight Networks is pleased to be working with MLB Advanced Media to help make the game more accessible to fans in more places by enabling a great mobile baseball listening experience in MLB.com At Bat 2009,” said Peter Coppola, vice president, product management, Limelight Networks, Inc.

The MLB.com At Bat 2009 application enables fans to listen to live broadcasts of every Major League Baseball game without blackout restrictions through the final game of the World Series. The application also includes MLB.com Gameday, which shows detailed pitch-by-pitch information, and a continuously-updated MLB scoreboard.

Spinnaker Supports Live Streaming to iPhone

Inlet Technologies, the leading provider of live streaming and on-demand solutions for digital media, announced that the company is one of the first encoding technology providers to publicly demonstrate and support live streaming to the Apple iPhone. Inlet was the first to showcase iPhone streaming at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference last month in San Francisco.

Using iPhone OS 3.0 and the latest release of Inlet’s Spinnaker live streaming solution, real-time streaming of live sports, news or other events can now reach an iPhone. Additionally, capabilities similar to Apple’s Stream Segmenter will be built directly into Spinnaker, simplifying the customer’s workflow and eliminating additional hardware from the system. The level of interoperability provided by Spinnaker allows content creators to stream live to the iPhone in popular formats including H.264 video and HE-AAC audio. These new advances enable any broadcaster, sports league or entertainment provider to deliver live content to the iPhone with a minimum of effort.

“We are proud to add this to a long list of industry ‘firsts’ from Inlet. By supporting live streaming to Apple’s iPhone, Inlet is once again at the forefront of the digital media revolution. The iPhone is clearly a pervasive consumer device, offering compelling opportunities to reach viewers.” said John Bishop, senior vice president of strategy and business development, Inlet Technologies. “This also reflects our continued commitment to helping companies increase the reach of their content, in any format to any screen, through intelligent media infrastructure solutions.”

Inlet’s Spinnaker family of live streaming appliances delivers stunning picture quality (in HD or SD), allowing content creators to offer viewers a “living room” experience over the Web. Spinnaker supports all of the major formats, including H.264, VC-1, Silverlight and Flash VP6, and allows content creators to stream multiple formats simultaneously from one source. Spinnaker is ideal for live sports, as it can create real-time highlights without the need for additional file preparation. Users can switch between multiple games or multiple camera angles during a single event. URLs or captions, such as scores and statistics, can also be inserted directly into the live stream. Spinnaker also offers calendar-based scheduling (ideal for recurring events), 24/7 reliability, and is designed to be used remotely, in fleets, or locally.

In addition to support for streaming to Apple’s iPhone, Spinnaker also includes support for other adaptive streaming protocols, including Microsoft Smooth Streaming and Adobe Dynamic Streaming. Other updates include multi-encoder synchronization and numerous audio enhancements.

Sorenson Media Announces Direct-to-iPhone Video Publishing

In conjunction with the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference June 8-12, Sorenson Media announced the immediate availability of new iPhone video publishing for its Sorenson 360 Video Delivery Network (VDN). This new solution enables small- to medium-sized businesses, video professionals, bloggers and other content creators to quickly and seamlessly encode and publish the highest quality video content on the Internet for direct viewing by Apple iPhone users (i.e. through the iPhone's Web browser and without the need to install a separate app). The enhanced Sorenson 360 VDN represents a significant step forward in one-stop online video publishing across major platforms and devices, including the recently announced iPhone OS 3.0 and the iPhone 3G S.

“With the addition of iPhone publishing for Sorenson 360, Sorenson Media is greatly expanding the reach and power of what is already the most cost-effective and user-friendly online video publishing solution in the marketplace,” said Peter Csathy, CEO of Sorenson Media. “Up to this point, video playback on the iPhone has simply been out of reach for video professionals. This new release reinforces the hallmarks of Sorenson 360 - unparalleled quality, innovation, flexibility, ease-of-use and affordability. It is now easier than ever for anyone to publish iPhone-ready video content over the Internet.”

In contrast to the one-format-fits-all approach used by many online video publishing services, in which the user has little flexibility in the video format and player used, Sorenson 360 offers specific iPhone presets, enabling users to easily encode video content in the iPhone-compatible H.264 format and deliver that content using the iPhone's native video player. This is a significant development because, while the majority of online video content is encoded in Adobe Flash format, the iPhone does not play Flash content, meaning most videos featured on Web sites are not viewable using the iPhone's Web browser. With Sorenson 360, video professionals can reach their audiences virtually anywhere the Internet is available, including on the iPhone.

“Sorenson 360 simplifies the experience of the video publisher and the iPhone user alike through its ability to automatically detect how the user is accessing a video file - whether through a traditional browser on a desktop or laptop computer, or through the iPhone's Web browser,” said David Dudas, vice president of product management. “Based on this information, Sorenson 360 then automatically delivers the video file using the appropriate player - a Flash player for users on desktops or laptops, or the iPhone’s native video player for iPhone users.”

The Sorenson 360 VDN enables users to encode and upload video content either seamlessly through the industry-leading Sorenson Squeeze software or directly via their browsers using the Sorenson 360 interface; both processes significantly reduce upload time and provide automatic access to the iPhone presets. Through its unique browser-based encoding tool, Sorenson 360 users simply drag and drop their video files from their hard drive or record new videos via their webcams and, with one step, publish and make them playable directly on an iPhone.

Sorenson 360 is compatible with all versions of Apple iPhone - iPhone 3G S, iPhone 3G and prior versions 1 and 2 - as well as Apple iPod Touch via WiFi. This includes the iPhone OS 3.0 and the Safari 4 browser. Video specifications for the Sorenson 360 iPhone presets are: H.264 video codec - MP4 output, up to 1 Mbps, 640 x 480 pixels, 30 frames per second.

NAB Follow-up for Streaming and Compression Tools

Here's a Follow-up for Streaming and Compression Tools at NAB 2009. Most of the buzz this NAB was surrounding Microsoft's Smooth Streaming and its implementation in various tools. This looks to be very exciting and allows automatic adjustment to lower or higher datarate for live and on-demand streams. The quality of the streams is impacted by the bandwidth available.

Inlet Technologies has some tools that have implemented the Smooth Streaming for on-demand and live streaming. They also have a tool that provides great post encoding video analysis and called Semaphore. The tool has been out for a while but now it's included in their Armada encoding product that provides large scale encoding. By large scale encoding I'm talking about hundreds and thousands of files being encoding. The tool can do checks at the end to make sure there were no technical issues like dropped frames, audio loss, etc. There are far to many features to list in this blog post. Make sure you visit the Inlet website.

Wowza Media Systems will have a new release of their server that supports Smooth Streaming and Silverlight. I can't wait. The next release will also allow live streaming to the iPhone. Amazing! Check out there website. We'll that's enough for this post. Time to catch a plane.

Wowza Combines Flash, Silverlight, iPhone, RTP and MPEG-TS Compatible Streaming Capabilities in a Single Server

Wowza Media Systems, maker of the #1 rated Wowza Media Server Pro streaming software for Flash, is taking the capabilities of its server beyond Flash with a NAB preview of the industry's first multi-protocol media streaming platform that combines Flash, Silverlight, iPhone, RTSP/RTP, and MPEG-TS compatible streaming in a single server. The preview will take place April 20-23, 2009 at NAB booth C1362 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This sneak peek at the new platform, dubbed Wowza Media Server Pro Advanced, represents the first step towards realizing Wowza's vision of unified infrastructure server software that enables streaming from any codec, over any protocol to any player or device, served from any operating system.

The NAB demonstration will showcase Wowza Pro’s award-winning Flash streaming capabilities, currently deployed by over 20,000 worldwide licensees, along with a preview of smooth streaming to Silverlight, HTTP streaming to iPhone, RTP/RTSP streaming to the QuickTime player, and MPEG-TS streaming in full HD to IPTV set-top boxes.

"Our sole focus on media servers enables Wowza Media Systems to empower the industry with infrastructure grade server software that doesn’t constrain content delivery to a specific OS, protocol, player or device," commented David Stubenvoll, CEO and Co-Founder, Wowza Media Systems. "Also, being mindful of the economic and environmental climate, it is our goal to facilitate the unification of the media streaming infrastructure in such a way that generates significant operational and cost benefits for our customers."

The company plans to make Wowza Media Server Pro Advanced commercially available in the second half of 2009. Pricing will be announced at a later date. All purchases of Wowza Media Server Pro Unlimited editions after April 8, 2009 are eligible for a free upgrade to Wowza Media Server Pro Advanced. Interested parties can pre-register for the Wowza Media Server Pro Advanced preview release at www.wowzamedia.com/advanced.

To see the live preview of Wowza Media Server Pro Advanced platform, visit Wowza at NAB booth C1362, April 20-23, 2009 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.