Wowza Community

How to ensure all your viewers can watch the live stream?

Did some test for my clients. The feedback is that sometimes the loading is slow or crash. What are the best practices to ensure global viewers are able to watch the stream smoothly using any devices or browsers? I’m mainly streaming at 720p and wowza will auto create 5 bitrate renditions. Technically that should solve the slow internet issue but it is still not foolproof.

Kenny,

It totally depends on your viewers available bandwidth and the devices they are requesting the stream from. Some devices will go ahead and request the largest rendition, like Android, and then it will adopt the adaptive bitrate after the initial chunk.

iOS on the other hand will start with the smallest usually and then jump to what the network/device determines it can handle.

As for desktops, they should make a more accurate request based on the information available to it at the time.

Once thing you could consider is to create a second stream target that is specific to your “lower speed” viewers where you only provide something like 360p and lower renditions.

Drive the bitrate lower for them and provide the option. It will still be adaptive bitrate, however, you set the starting bitrate for them in this scenario.

There is some configuration on your side, but it is a simple click for them to switch to a different player to improve the playback option.

I do hope this is helpful.

Regards,

Mac