Wowza Community

Daily license question

Is there a minimum amount of time before you are charged for a day or is a day prorated? I like to do a lot of testing from time to time and I can see a case where I stream for 10 minutes doing a test. I would hate for it to cost me $5 every time I do that.

Hi,

I believe if an instance of Wowza is started you will be billed for the day.

If you’re testing you can either apply for a trial license which is 30 days or apply for a developer license which lasts 180.

More information on trial and developer licenses and the applications forms can be found here,

Trial license

Developer license

Jason

Hi,

The daily license is billed based on each instance running at any time during a 24 hour interval according to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). For example, if a daily license runs from 5 PM to 10 PM, Eastern Time, the account will be billed for two days because our system will have logged the instance as active from 9 PM to 2 AM, GMT. There is no pro-rated schedule for partial up-time.

It sounds like you need a license solution for testing. I suggest that you request a Developer License. The Developer license is valid for 180 days and provides full, unrestricted functionality including premium AddOns (Transcoder, nDVR, DRM). That said, the Developer License does NOT allow HTTP Origin nor StreamLock functionality. Also, you will be limited to 2 inbound and 10 outbound streams for testing. In most cases, this is a very viable solution. For more information, take a look at our Wowza Media Server for Developers Page.

-Tim

Hi,

You may want to consider Wowza for Amazon EC2. By subscribing to depay service, and activating one of our pre-built AMI’s, you may use Wowza for a low, hourly rate which is billed directly through Amazon Web Services. AWS requires a monthly $5 subscription fee for this service, however, the per-hour charges are pro-rated based on total use of the AMI. This is a very economical solution, however, you will not have access to premium AddOns like the Transcoder and DVR service. For more information, see the following resources:

Amazon for EC2 User’s Guide

Amazon for EC2 Support Page

List of Pre Built AMI’s

Wowza for EC2 Pricing Information

I regret that the daily license configuration is not optimal for your workflow. You are welcome to speak with our Sales team directly by sending an email to sales@wowza.com.

-Tim

That’s not good at all. A year after using Wirecast, I am still testing different stuff all the time. We do 4 shows a month and between shows I often like to do test to see what impact different setting have on various parts of the process. Paying $5 every time I do a test is going to be painful.

Another question, the “per day” price is that based on my time zone or Wowza’s? If not based on my time zone, what happens if I start a show and end a show all in the same day according to my time zone, but it crosses days in Wowza’s time zone? Is that considered two days? What is Wowza’s time zone?

Well that’s just terrible. My show starts at 7:30pm Eastern and ends around 9:30pm Eastern, but often goes as long as 10pm Eastern if you count the “after show”. That means that every show I do will count as two days although I really only used the software for 2 or 2.5 hours.