Live Streaming from One Camera to Many Devices: The Basics

Just because you've got a simple setup with one camera and limited output doesn't mean you can't stream to a wide range of devices.

At the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, Chris Knowlton, vice president of product management for Wowza, explained how to successfully send a live stream from a remote location, a stream that viewers and customers can see no matter what device they're using.

"The major question that the session hopes to answer is, if you have so many different formats and streaming protocols and devices out there, and you want to hit as many of those as possible in order to address the widest number of users, how best can you do that with the least amount of infrastructure and the least amount of expense?" said Knowlton.

While Knowlton admitted to a bias to Wowza products (not surprising), he gave instructions that apply no matter the server being used. He began with a diagram of a simple workflow and built from there.

"The basic workflow for anything you're going to be doing is going to be the basic I have a camera for a live stream, I'm going to encode it, push it into a server -- in our case it'll just be a single-origin server, a media server -- and then push that to various clients. So, I'll build on this when we get into the multiformat workflow in a few minutes, but that's just the basic premise," explained Knowlton. "It could be a file for those of you who aren't doing live or who are recording something now and then playing it back later."

To view the full demonstration, watch the video below. Be sure to download the PDF file of Knowlton's presentation.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net