Wowza Community

Wowza Doesn't Work on HiSense TVs??

Hello, all:

Hoping for some ideas here.

My understanding is Wowza Streaming Engine is a world-class, best-in-class streaming solution. That’s why I chose it. For the most part it’s absolutely rock solid.

But I keep having weird this-and-that problems that I can’t for the life of me root out.

The feed out of Wowza is feeding a TV network. Our network is both broadcast over the air and streaming to several streaming services. One of our streaming services reports that our feed is working perfectly fine on Apple, Android, Linux, and Windows devices; however, it is NOT working on HiSense TVs.

Does anyone have any theories on why this would be? Why would a Wowza HLS feed work on every other device except one particular type? It does not appear to be a defective HiSense TV, as the streaming company tested it on two different HiSense TV models.

Ideas? Thank you so much!!

If you’d ask 10 random experts in the Streaming Industry about the most challenging device type, you’d get 10 times the same answer: SmartTVs. I doubt this is Wowza’s fault, most likely it’s the way HiSense has interpreted and implemented the standards.

Do you happen to have any documentation from HiSense about this? It may be the chunk size, or the playlist size, or the PTS, or a dozen other tweaks … And what’s the exact behaviour; doesn’t it play at all?

Also, have you tested to play back MPEG-DASH? If it’s a HbbTV-compliant device, then it should be possible to play DASH (but you may get in trouble with the DASH profile …)

Good response. Yeah, I’ll have to dig around. I don’t know a darned thing about the HiSense and I don’t have one to test with.

I’m told that on one HiSense model the feed is not playing at all. On another it plays but with freezing every couple of seconds.

The complication with these streaming services is they typically don’t like multiple feeds (DASH and HLS). They just want to ingest one feed and spit it back out to all their participating devices. Maybe I can get them to try DASH instead of HLS?