Wowza Community

What does processing hours mean?

I just need some clarification, does it mean the total amount of hours we are able to stream for a month?

Thanks for hiding my message behind a moderation wall.

Hello John and welcome to the forums! All new users to the forums have to be approved by a moderator. Unfortunately, there are people that join the forums to post spam or inappropriate content. Once we see your post is relevant to live streaming, you are free to post from this point forward.

Let me seek total clarification from our billing team in regards to your question and your options. I will respond shortly - thanks for your patience. Rose

Stream processing hours are the total amount of transcoding time consumed on Wowza Streaming Cloud, in one-minute increments.

Unlike other services, Wowza Streaming Cloud does not charge additional fees for HD content or your number of output renditions. Just track your total live-streaming time, and that’s it.

If you’d like to get an idea of how much this may cost you based on you streaming workflow, I will share this calculator with you:

https://www.wowza.com/pricing/streaming-cloud-plans/calculator

I hope this helps you.

Some additional info for you because you do have options and I’d like it to be clear for you:

On any of Live Event plans, you will be charged for transcoding or processing fees.

In our 24/7 Passthrough plan, if you properly set up a single bitrate stream through Cloud, you will NOT be charged any transcoding or processing fees, you will only be charged for that plan and for bandwidth hours. There is no transcoding taking place in the normal 24/7 passthrough plan.

So the 24/7 Passthrough plan is budget friendly, but may not suit your streaming needs especially for scaling and playback. Keep in mind too, that you need to be on the 24/7 plan to receive that pricing. What I mean by that is if you are in a live event plan and you happen to stream for 24 hours straight, you will be charged all the processing fees for that. So, be careful to select your plan based on your streaming needs.

Reach out should you need additional clarification.