Wowza Community

starting a live video stream website on a very tight budget

Hello, I am interested in creating a video conference website (similar to tinychat), I would like to know if you could give me the necessary information / requirements needed to create a live stream video conference website on a very tight budget. I have some questions and I would really appreciate if someone could take sometime to respond.

  1. Has Wowza already been configured for use straight away or would I have to find someone to configure wowza for this project.

  2. Are there any reliable “already made” script that could be used for a live video conference website.

  3. Based on affordability and efficiency/uptime Which flash media server hosting service would be best to host a live stream website.

  4. Data management: I don’t intend to save video logs as it would require a lot of storage space and money, so I would like to know if it would be wise to operate a live streaming website without saving the video logs.

  5. What is the minimum data / capacity required to operate a multi-user live streaming website (storage space, bandwidth etc)

  6. Video compression: I intend to roll this service out in my country, however the internet speed here is not as fast as that of most developed nations so I would like to know if it is possible to compress the live video streams so that despite the poor internet connections users would still be able to use the website, I know video compression would result in the loss of stream quality but I am hoping the loss of quality wouldn’t be too much.

7.What is the cost of using wowza media systems for a live video conference website. I am on a very tight budget here so I want to know if I would be able to afford wowza for this project.

Hope to get some response. Thanks in advance

Anyone? I would really appreciate some response here. Thanks

Hi,

Please see your questions below followed by my responses:

  1. Has Wowza already been configured for use straight away or would I have to find someone to configure wowza for this project.
  • Wowza has a “VideoChat” example that can be found in the [Wowza-Install]/examples/ directory and a Video Chat tutorial
  1. Are there any reliable “already made” script that could be used for a live video conference website.
  • The example we provide is very basic and is to show that it’s possible. For a professional video chat/conference website you will likely want to research some third party additions to Wowza such as HDFVR
  1. Based on affordability and efficiency/uptime Which flash media server hosting service would be best to host a live stream website.
  • You would need to research which deal is best for you but if you’re looking for a server which is in the cloud which has Wowza Streaming Engine installed, you can use the following options:

Amazon EC2: Quick Start Guide and EC2 Pre-bulit AMIs

Google GCE: How to set up Wowza Streaming Engine for Google Compute Engine

Microsoft Azure: Windows or Linux

  1. Data management: I don’t intend to save video logs as it would require a lot of storage space and money, so I would like to know if it would be wise to operate a live streaming website without saving the video logs.
  1. What is the minimum data / capacity required to operate a multi-user live streaming website (storage space, bandwidth etc)
  • This would be dependent on the bitrate of the streams being published and the number of clients that are connecting.
  1. Video compression: I intend to roll this service out in my country, however the internet speed here is not as fast as that of most developed nations so I would like to know if it is possible to compress the live video streams so that despite the poor internet connections users would still be able to use the website, I know video compression would result in the loss of stream quality but I am hoping the loss of quality wouldn’t be too much.
  • The video compression isn’t done by Wowza it’s how the video is encoded and is dependent on the codec which is being used. When using H.264 video codec the video has already been compressed and can’t be compressed further on the Wowza side for low bandwidth users. One option would be to use the transcoder to create lower bitrate streams however transcoding is a CPU intensive process and will require that you get a server which may be a higher spec than you would have done before. Adaptive bitrate streaming can be done with RTMP when using JW player which may be an option for you.

7.What is the cost of using wowza media systems for a live video conference website. I am on a very tight budget here so I want to know if I would be able to afford wowza for this project.

  • Please see the Pricing page for further details and the above cloud options for the specifics on each provider as they will vary dependent on server spec and bandwidth usage.

Regards,

Jason