Hi @Paul_Moores welcome to the forums and hey you know we all had to start at step 1 so please feel free to ask whatever you’d like in here. During this past year, thousands of people have been in your shoes and so we are more than happy to help.
There are some basic encoding settings you could check to make sure you’re not consuming too much of your server’s capacity or trying to send too high of bitrate that can cause issues. Here is a pretty good intro blog on things like optimal audio and video bitrates. You can read that here
Typically the best best for viewers watching from all kinds of different devices is sending the stream out over HLS which works well on almost all screens. That would be a playback link that uses an M3U8 tag on the end. You can read how to set up HLS here:
Now HLS is reliable but it has some delay so if you want to get the latency from 30- 40 seconds down to about 6 to 8 seconds, you can go in Engine and change the length of the video segments from the default 10 seconds for each one, to only 2 seconds.
Direction for reducing latency in HLS here.
If viewers are experiencing buffer and jitter it could mean their viewing device or network is not able to handle the incoming bitrate, so in streaming it’s typical to have adaptive bitrate streaming set up which allows players to quickly switch to a lower bitrate and avoid buffer issues.
You can set up Adaptive Bitrate Streaming in Engine -here is a video tutorial
You could send an RTMP stream to Wowza and deliver it over webrtc which would give you less than 1 second, but it’s advanced workflow and is best for very small audiences so if you’re trying to scale to a lot of viewers and that number could fluctuate quickly, you’d want to have HLS and potentially a scaling plan in place.
That is how you can jump from say 100 viewers to a few thousand without burning up all your CPU and bandwidth.
Scaling: In engine, you could add the WOWZA CDN feature to your account and pay for what you use. Here is the info.
You could use a second wowza server to distribute, but again, that’s advanced and not sure you want to go that route.
My advice to you since you are new to streaming and I really mean this in your best interest is to send your stream from Wirecast to Wowza Streaming Cloud where it is already built on a CDN and will automatically do all the scaling for you and delivers over HLS. We provide streams up tp 300,00 people in Cloud and it’s considered a more user friendly setup for someone new to streaming.
I’m trying to share as many resources as I can to help you below, but the best best is a free consultation with a sales engineer who will ask more questions about your event then use a price calculator to guide you to the most cost-effective plan for you.
We can also help you scale through Engine as well and we’d be happy to help you get that set up for you as well. You can send an email to sales@wowza.com and they can direct you with your technical questions on choosing a plan that will be deliver the stream to as many viewers as possible without the jitter or buffer issues.
Hope this was helpful!
Take a look at all our wowza blogs on wowza site as well as all the video tutorials we have on the topics I mentioned on wowza you tube.
