Hi everyone. I am new at this and streaming. hopefully someone can help me with the following setup that we are trying to accomplish.
we are trying to live stream or broadcast to our other offices. so basically what we are trying to do is in our Boston office is where I will have pearl 2 setup and capture the live video. and I would like to stream this out to our other offices that are located in LA , Orlando and NYC. I will need a streaming server ? is it better to setup our own server if we have the bandwidth ? and is setting up this server easy ? do you have know what type of server I should start looking ?
and once I have this… people in LA, NYC,FL can just goto the webcast URL and watch it live ?
and setting this up in epiphan is easy for uploading to the server I assume ?
is there a guide for this setup ? that I can check out ? Thanks for your help and opinions.
Hi Kenny,
Interesting setup. Are you planning on having one central display at each of the offices acting as a Window into your Boston office? Or are you going to let users access the stream individually?
If this is just one stream out to each office then you may be able to skip the server and just have direct unicast connections to the Pearl2 itself. But if there will be multiple streams to each office, as in the case of employees accessing the streams individually, then you will likely need some kind of server or CDN service.
For servers/CDNS your options are basically to have a server setup at each remote office. This server would ingest the stream from the Pearl2 in Boston, and redistribute it to the viewers within this remote office. Or you could use a CDN service, where you stream out once to this CDN from the Pearl2, then it redistributes to all viewers everywhere. The downside of the CDN are it will cost money if you need something secure / customized like Vimeo vs YouTube which would be free. Also the CDN would use up downstream internet bandwidth for each viewer. Conversely the local server would have hardware / software costs but wouldn’t have any additional service fees, and would reduce overall traffic.
Adam
thank you for replying.
we are trying to let users access the stream individually.
I think we are going the route with setting up the server at one location and accessible via external network.
we can spin up an server with ease from our VM Team. the only thing I need more info about is the type of application I need to look for ? setting up an RTSP server ? so that I can upload the feed from Pearl 2 ? once the stream is uploaded to the RTSP server… once I have the correct stream link, I can foward to outside users for viewing ?
If you are planning on setting up just a single server, then this would be unnecessary. In this setup you might as well just access streams from the Pearl directly as the bandwidth usage will be the same.
The only ways to reduce bandwidth usage would be to either set up servers at each remote location (can be expensive) or to use a CDN service in the cloud which would help with upload bandwidth, but download bandwidth usage would remain the same. Personally a CDN service would be my recommendation, this could be YouTube, Vimeo, Wowza Cloud, etc.
If you are looking at streaming server software then I would recommend taking a look at Wowza Streaming Engine: https://www.wowza.com/products/streaming-engine