Architecting High-Availability Transcoding and Multi-CDN Delivery

In the high-stakes world of always-on surveillance and regulated enterprise video, the promise of “cloud transcoding” often comes with a lack of control. While fully managed SaaS solutions offer simplicity, they can introduce “black box” limitations. That simply doesn’t work in secure, highly regulated, or mission-critical environments.

To truly master content delivery and ensure buffer-free, top-quality viewing across diverse devices and networks, engineering teams need a hybrid approach. This unlocks the power of cloud-scale redundancy without sacrificing the precision of self-hosted infrastructure.

How To Overcome Local Transcoding Bottlenecks

Most modern encoders and IP cameras can output multiple bitrates, but that capability comes with trade-offs. Producing an ABR ladder at the source increases upstream bandwidth requirements and becomes a configuration burden at scale. In practice, building the adaptive bitrate ladder at the source may look like a shortcut to avoid downstream transcoding costs. However, it introduces operational risk and demands significantly more bandwidth. Any CPU spike, misconfigured profile, or unstable uplink immediately impacts all downstream delivery paths.

Many IP cameras only support two profiles, typically a high and low stream. So, “true” ABR isn’t even possible. Software encoders can generate additional variants, and tools exist that allow OBS to publish multiple outputs. However, every added encode increases CPU load and raises the risk of destabilizing the entire workflow. Even when outputs share a single encode, each destination still consumes more contribution bandwidth. This becomes its own point of failure.

This is where Wowza Streaming Engine (WSE) steps in, acting not just as a server, but as a customizable transcoding powerhouse. Shifting the heavy lifting of transcoding to a WSE instance (deployed on-prem, in a private cloud, or air-gapped environment) provides flexibility to accept virtually any input source. From RTSP surveillance feeds to SRT broadcast contributions, WSE then transforms these feeds into optimized ABR streams.

This architecture provides three critical advantages:

1. Content Security & Compliance
   Keep your unencrypted source feeds within your secure network perimeter until they are ready for public distribution.
2. Format Flexibility
   Generate HLS, DASH, and other formats dynamically to ensure seamless playback on everything from legacy set-top boxes to modern mobile devices.
3. Reliable Delivery at Scale
   WSE doesn’t just output to one destination; it can replicate and push streams to multiple endpoints simultaneously, decoupling your ingest from your delivery.

The Multi-CDN Advantage: Breaking Free from Vendor Lock-In

For broadcasters and surveillance operators, a single managed cloud provider creates a vendor lock-in risk. If the region goes down, streams go dark. Wowza Streaming Engine provides a solution that rivals tier-1 broadcast reliability (approaching “five nines” or 99.999% uptime) by controlling the entire chain.

• Ingest Layer
  Deploy dual encoders pushing redundant feeds to separate ingest points.
• Origin Layer
  Utilize two distinct Wowza Streaming Engine origin servers. If Primary Origin fails, the Secondary Origin instantly takes over, maintaining the transcoding pipeline.
• Delivery Layer
  This is the game-changer. Instead of relying on a single CDN, WSE can serve your transcoded streams to two different top-tier CDNs (e.g., Akamai and Fastly, or a combination including Wowza’s global CDN service) simultaneously.

In this updated topology, the CDN layer sits between the WSE origin and the end-user device. By feeding multiple leaders in the CDN space, if one network experiences congestion or an outage in a specific region, the other(s) can make up for it. This avoids teams becoming beholden to a single provider’s infrastructure.

This approach represents the best of both worlds. Massive global scale and caching power is provided by public CDNs, backed by the granular control, security, and failover logic of a dedicated Wowza Streaming Engine origin.

By leveraging Wowza Streaming Engine as a transcoding and origin hub, video surveillance teams and system architects unlock a future-proof, vendor-agnostic workflow. Whether it’s for monitoring critical infrastructure or broadcasting a live event to millions, this delivers the seamless, high-quality experience viewers demand, safeguarded by redundancy that modern businesses require. Get a closer look at Wowza Streaming Engine today.