Wednesday, October 10, 2012

live video streaming options

Looking for options for streaming live video for more concurrent viewers than currently supported by our single dedicated server, found a nice guide to setting up wowza on AWS at
http://churchm.ag/how-to-build-a-live-stream-for-online-church-on-the-cheap/   Google Hangouts on Air had the problem that it did not work with firewire video inputs on MacOS.   We don't have Youtube live streaming partner status yet.   P wanted a way in which we could push the stream to our server using multiple connections for fail-safe operation. Did not find any such option which would work with our Wowza server.   Other options:

1. Hire from utream.tv
https://www.ustream.tv/ustream-pro/pricing

By paying $500, we can get 4000 viewer hours, which will be enough for 22/23 Nov.

2. Hire from justin.tv
http://www.justin.tv/payments/premium/

$400 for 3000 viewer hours.

3. Hire from livestream.com
http://new.livestream.com/broadcast-live/original-pricing-plans

$350 for 3000 viewer hours.

4. We can hire one more server from Voxel,

$180, and get 4000 GB of traffic. We will still be limited to around 1000 simulaneous viewers with this option.

5. We can hire from dacast.com,
http://www.dacast.com/streaming-pricing-plans.html

$170 and get 1000 GB traffic, or maybe even $100 for 500 GB traffic, with unlimited simultaneous viewers.

This seems a good option, since 22/23 Nov traffic is expected be < 1000 GB for video. Also, no hassles of setting up.

6. We can hire from Amazon Web Services,
http://www.wowza.com/pricing/ec2-streaming
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing//184-5034279-7838454/

with bandwidth charged at $0.12 per GB = $120 for 1000 GB. But we have to do some setup ourselves, and if traffic is high, set up additional instances etc. Difficult, in my opinion, since we will all be busy at that time.

For decision-making, our past statistics at
http://stream.radiosai.org/awstats/awstats.pl?config=wowza

would be useful. Especially the Feb (Shivaratri) & April (Samadhi day) stats.

Later, P added BitGravity which belongs to Tata as another option if we get good pricing, and also the unlimited new plan from livestream, for use all year round.

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