How Swift Delivers Video to Remote Sites by Embedding Wowza Streaming Engine at the Edge

Swift has spent nearly 20 years bringing entertainment and communication platforms to some of the most isolated places people live and work. The company started in mining, oil, and gas, serving camps that sit hundreds or thousands of kilometers from the nearest capital city or town. That same platform now reaches aged-care facilities, hospitality sites, and exploration camps that often connect to the outside world through nothing more than a satellite dish.

Adam Ashley, Chief Technology Officer at Swift, recently joined us for a discussion about the architecture his team built. We discussed why Swift embeds Wowza Streaming Engine directly into its product at the edge and how the platform delivers reliable video across connections most providers would write off as unusable. Watch the full webinar here.

How Does Swift Deliver Video To Remote Sites?

Swift embeds Wowza Streaming Engine at the edge of its platform. It runs the media server on-site at each remote location instead of in a central cloud. This lets Swift ingest content once, cache it locally, and deliver it to devices in whatever format required, even when a site reaches the internet through a low-bandwidth satellite link. The result is a turnkey streaming layer that Swift ships to mining camps, care facilities, and hospitality sites globally.

Why Does Streaming to Remote Sites Break Standard Cloud Architectures?

Remote-site streaming breaks under standard cloud architectures because the link between the site and the cloud cannot carry enough bandwidth for everyone watching at once. A 500-person camp might have a 100 megabit connection for the entire site. That architecture collapses under load.

“While 20 megabits might work for you at home by yourself, you put 100 rooms, 100 people streaming off that, and it’s a very different technological solution.”

Adam Ashley, CTO at Swift

The geographic isolation makes the problem harder. Swift serves sites that sit hundreds of kilometers from the nearest town. Here, no carrier provides connectivity, and every service has to arrive with the site operator.

For years, the only answer was a fully on-premises build. That often came with a price tag that started at around $1 million AUD per site. Those costs only grew from there, and Swift needed to find a solution that didn’t limit their options. Swift needed to move content distribution onto the internet link and shrink the on-site footprint, all without sacrificing the experience or incurring exorbitant costs. Pushing the media server to the edge, as close to the viewer as possible, became the solution.

Why Did Swift Embed Wowza Streaming Engine At The Edge?

Swift embeds Wowza Streaming Engine at the edge to ingest content, cache it on-site, and output in every format. When Swift evaluated options, most media server software focused only on over-the-top delivery across the open internet. They didn’t support formats like RTSP or multicast UDP. Wowza Streaming Engine handles all of this reliably. As a result, Swift transfers and caches content locally before delivering it as multicast UDP linear channels, HLS, MPEG-DASH, RTSP, and SRT, depending on the viewing device.

Deployment flexibility sealed the deal for Swift. Wowza Streaming Engine ships with an automated install package and licensing key, which Swift could fold directly into its configuration management to deploy the software straight into the operating system. Swift now packages Wowza Streaming Engine in Docker containers and pushes updates to every site on a regular schedule. Embedding Wowza freed Swift to spend its engineering effort on its own product, not building streaming infrastructure from scratch. For a company that builds and sells its own platform, that reliability is the entire point of an embedded approach.

“The best thing I can say is I don’t have to think about Wowza.”

Adam Ashley, CTO at Swift

Breaking Down Swift’s Edge Architecture

Swift’s architecture pairs a multi-tenant cloud with an edge server at every site. The cloud ingests content from providers, runs Swift’s business logic, and manages the platform across all of its customers. The edge server, running Wowza Streaming Engine, handles caching and delivery inside the site. The custom caching layer stores the content a viewer wants on-site before they press play. That design lets Swift deploy the platform anywhere, including across fiber, Starlink, and satellite links too narrow for most teams.

What Embedded Edge Streaming Looks Like in Production

Embedded edge streaming powers far more than movies at Swift sites. On mine sites, in-room TVs carry the operational communications that workers would otherwise only hear at a five-minute shift stand-up. That ranges from mess menus and event schedules to safety notices. Swift integrates the platform with the site’s public address system, so an emergency alert mutes every TV and provides instructions.

In care facilities, the same Wowza-powered infrastructure lets family members upload videos to an app. Then, that video appears on a resident’s TV within minutes. It redistributes live chapel services between facilities so residents can join a service that matches their faith, even when it streams from another site.

The Results: A Decade of Scale on the Same Foundation

Swift’s edge servers are still running in production today. The team built each one to deliver 3,000 concurrent streams, and the only reason Swift is replacing any of them is that the hardware is no longer manufactured. The platform now supports sites as large as 2,400 rooms. Local content draws 30%-40% daily engagement, which pulls that demand off the internet connection and allocates bandwidth more efficiently. A platform architected correctly at the edge a decade ago still carries the load, and that longevity is one of the strongest arguments for the approach.

How Wowza Supports OEM and Embedded Streaming Deployments

An OEM streaming deployment embeds a third-party media server inside a company’s own product or hardware instead of relying on a separate hosted service. Swift builds Wowza Streaming Engine into a platform it sells and operates, and its customers never interact with the media server directly. Wowza Streaming Engine deploys in the cloud, on-premises, in hybrid configurations, and at the edge, which gives product teams the flexibility to match the deployment to the environment.

Automated installation, container support, and broad protocol coverage make Wowza Streaming Engine straightforward to ship inside an application or device. Teams running remote and field operations can build it into industrial and remote operations systems, and teams in care settings can embed it into healthcare and medical technology platforms.

Watch the Swift Webinar On-Demand

This recap covers the highlights, but the full webinar goes much deeper, including a complete architecture walkthrough, a live product demo, and an operational playbook for managing servers across remote sites with no local access. Listen to Adam’s advice for teams building embedded streaming into their own products. Anyone weighing an edge or OEM streaming deployment will find the full conversation worth the time. Reach out if you have any questions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is edge video streaming?

Edge video streaming runs the media server at or near the viewing location rather than in a central cloud. Processing and caching content close to viewers reduces the bandwidth a site needs on its connection to the internet, which makes reliable delivery possible at remote and bandwidth-constrained locations.

Can Wowza Streaming Engine be embedded into a product or application?

Yes. Wowza Streaming Engine is built to be embedded into other companies’ applications, systems, and hardware. An automated install package, Docker container support, and a full REST and Java API let product teams integrate and deploy Wowza Streaming Engine inside their own software and ship it to their customers.

What is an OEM streaming deployment?

An OEM streaming deployment embeds a third-party media server inside a company’s own product instead of using a separate hosted service. The company manages the media server as part of its platform, and its customers use the product without interacting with the underlying streaming software directly.

How does Wowza Streaming Engine deliver video to low-bandwidth sites?

Wowza Streaming Engine deploys at the edge and caches content on-site, so a location needs only enough bandwidth to pull content once rather than enough for every concurrent viewer. Swift uses this model to run its platform across connections that range from fiber and Starlink down to narrow satellite links.

Which streaming protocols does Wowza Streaming Engine support?

Wowza Streaming Engine supports a broad set of protocols, including RTMP, SRT, RTSP, WebRTC, HLS, and MPEG-DASH, along with multicast UDP for linear channels. This range lets a single engine ingest content and deliver it in whatever format each playback device requires.

Can Wowza Streaming Engine run in Docker containers?

Yes. Wowza distributes Wowza Streaming Engine as a Docker container, which simplifies deployment, configuration management, and updates. Swift packages its on-site servers in Docker and pushes updates to every location on a regular schedule.

What industries use edge streaming for remote sites?

Industries that operate in remote or bandwidth-constrained locations rely on edge streaming, including mining, oil and gas, exploration and construction, aged care, and hospitality. These operations use edge deployments to deliver entertainment, communications, and live video where central cloud delivery is not practical.