Double escaping is needed in Wowza Player setup which is not intuitive.
Now, if you have video called “s+b.mp4” in your “content” folder, you need to use
_https://example.com:4443/vod/mp4:s%252Bb.mp4/playlist.m3u8
While in all other cases (JWPlayer / HTML5
_https://example.com:4443/vod/mp4:s%2Bb.mp4/playlist.m3u8
I use Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0.3.
(Interesting that for RTMP one must use no escaping: rtmps://example.com:4443/vod/mp4:s+b.mp4 - but this issue is not about Wowza Player