HTTP Live Streaming a live broadcast with Wowza and a CDN - How?

Question

I've got an event I want to broadcast live to iOS devices within a custom made app. The app bit is sorted, as is the live video stream itself, but how do I get the feed from my Wowza server to a CDN with enough bandwidth & grunt to support 1,000+ users?

So the process I have in mind is as follows:

• Couple of cameras hooked up via HD-SDI to a Blackmagic ATEM switcher.

• Switcher's HDMI output hooked up to a PC with an Intensity Pro HDMI capture card, fed into Wirecast, which produces a high bitrate MPEG2 stream.

• A 2nd PC running Wowza Media Server which produces the 9 or so H264 streams Apple recommends for HLS.

• H264 feeds sent to a CDN with the index file containing URLs of the 9 feeds.

The step troubling me is the last one - how do I get the H264 feeds to a CDN? Some sort of batch FTP process? An API from the CDN? I'm not really sure!

Answer 1

As Stu pointed out, the Wowza Push Publish piece won't help you on HLS, as it only supports RTMP. On the other hand, a single Wowza instance on EC2 can handle 750M on some of the larger instance types, and can do the transcoding on the fly for you.

Answer 2

Each CDN is likely to be different.

You'll be looking specifically for one that can do HTTP Live streaming, or at least rapid propagation of flat files. Why? The h264 encoding is basically irrelevant to publishing the stream once the segmentation has occurred. HTTP Live Streaming it, at it's core, after segmenting, just a bunch of normal files served up statically. The magic is in the segmenting, not the distribution of the files. (I know Wowza has an RTMP push module, but that wont' help here.)

That said 1000+ users is not an insane number. Especially to iOS devices, as they won't be that bandwidth intensive. How much bandwidth do you really need? Let's assume an average of 512kbps. (With iOS devices you should be streaming in multiple qualities. Eg: 96kbps, 256kbps, 384kbps, 512kpbs, 768kbps and maybe 1024kbps. The devices themselves will regulate their quality. Over many cellular networks they won't be maxing out.)

512 kbps = 0.5mbps
0.5mbps * 1500 users = 750mbps 

If know your client connections well enough to say they aren't global they you easily could do this on a single half decent machine with a 1gbps Internet feed and quality peering--All without the cost, complications, or hassle of a throwing a CDN into the mix.

Flagrant self promotion: If you are streaming to mostly European clients, my company could do it for you. We have a 10gbps line. :)