Pause and timeshift VOD, and ALL viewers see pauses and shifts (Like Netflix Party)

[Tom_Shirley]

Is it possible to do the following?

• Multiple users consume the same HLS Wowza stream.

• One user (The Host) is able to: Pause, Resume, and time-shift the video.

• All users see the result of the pausing, resuming, and timeshifting at the same time.

It would be as if all users were in the same room, watching the same television. The holder of the remote control could pause, resume, and time-shift, and everyone would see the result.

Is this possible with a Wowza technology?

[Karel_Boek]

@Tom Shirley, do you have control over the front-end and the players? Because in that case I’d use a messaging server or service (PubNub or similar) and hook all users/players onto a message group; when you send a pause-message, you can pause all players. The entire thing would probably take like 10 lines of JavaScript, and is server-agnostic.

If you have control over the player but not the front-end, then maybe you could use ID3 timed events - but you’d still need JavaScript to make the player act upon a trigger.

And if you don’t have control over the players at all, then it’s really hard, I think. Stopping/Pausing the stream on the server will cause the player to stall, and after a few seconds it’ll give up trying to reconnect.

[Cassidy_Reilly]

Researching if we have an option…