Wowza Streaming Engine

"Nadaje Broadcasting recommends Wowza Streaming Engine "

Overall: Nadaje Broadcasting use Wowza to stream in multiple use cases: RTMP to HLS/DASH; RTSP to HLS/DASH; Secure token streaming with CDN - protected internal corporate streaming; Transcoding to lower quality to cover all devices. All this makes Wowza very flexible software and Nadaje Broadcasting's main video streaming software partner.

Pros: The most impactful features are transcoding and HLS/DASH web streaming. The software was easy to integrate and operate via the API and integration is stable while upgrading. Our company use Wowza Streaming Engine for over 10 years!

Cons: Additional charges for support and a bit heavy memory usage in some use cases. Also logging was not possible per a vhost.

"Poor customer experience with support and billing"

Overall: Our overall experience with Wowza Streaming Engine has been a mixed bag. It has required a lot of time and work to achieve the results that we were looking for. Upgrades and patching have been difficult and the documentation is at times out of date, incorrect, or difficult to follow. Support has been difficult to deal with especially since they will reference and send you links to the documentation to "help." It's been very difficult to work with Wowza and our experience overall has been poor. The software works well enough to get the job done but offers nothing exceptional in return.

Pros: Wowza has been an important part of our systems over the past 7 years or so. We have built several systems around streaming video on campus for different purposes. Wowza has been a mostly stable product that has allowed us to transmux, transcode, and distribute video across campus for a decent price.

Cons: The configuration and management of the servers is difficult. Upgrades in our environment are difficult because named user account configurations are difficult to deal with around the Wowza Streaming Engine product. You have not made it easy to upgrade software and full version upgrades from version 3 to version 4 was incredibly difficult. Webrtc implementation took some work to get working properly. Documentation is out of date at times and hard to follow. Customer support has been the worst experience we have had here and is causing us to rethink our use of Wowza. We keep on trying to change our billing but no one will work with us on it and we keep having billing issues every year. We never receive billing notices. We get late notices without ever receiving an initial billing notice or request. We request a PO but only get told to use a card. Our customer service representative never returns our calls and has not been helpful in this matter.

"Using Wowza to stream to .NET console application over HTTPS"

Overall: We have customers that are requesting a level of security that requires all documents and files, including videos, to be transported over HTTPS. We could copy and cache the videos on each user's machine, but it is far more efficient to be able to use a streaming video server to stream the videos over HTTPS and Wowza enables us to do this.

Pros: It was very easy to set up and use the streaming engine. It supports a wide variety of formats. It is capable of doing everything we need it to do and much, much more. The documentation was, for the most part, very clear and easy to follow, and the support staff that I contacted were very responsive and helpful.

Cons: As stated, the documentation was helpful, clear, and easy to follow, for the most part. I realize that our use case was an edge case as compared to the standard Wowza user, and that learning how to set up https/SSL/Streamlock, creating certificates, etc. does not actually have anything to do with Wowza software per se. However, their documentation in this regard was a big sparse and I had to supplement this with additional research. The stated requirement and references to OpenSSL was particularly confusing, because this piece of software was not required to do what I needed. I am unsure why half of the references say to use the Java keytool to create certificates, and other references state a requirement for OpenSSL to perform actions for which the keytool is definitely capable. Additionally, there was some confusion regarding the format of the URL to get the videos to successfully play over HTTPS. The format that the support team sent me did not work. However, by thoroughly reviewing the software in order to fully document my case for further support, I was able to come up with a format that did function. The fact that all these link formats should in fact point to the same place and perform the same function, but that only one actually worked, is probably my biggest, and really only, complaint with the software.