Video: Choosing a Streaming Production Platform
Learn more about streaming production platforms at Streaming Media West.
Watch its companion clip, Choosing a Web Distribution Platform.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Jan Ozer: Streaming poduction platforms add additional functionality the routing that we saw in Switchboard Live and other distribution platforms. It could be, again, overlays. It could be picture-in-picture. It could be stream insertion. But it's one step of functionality beyond what you get with the distribution platforms.
This is Easy Live. Who is their typical customer? It's B2B, media, corporate, eSport. Why web service rather than the individual encoders? Bandwidth and hardware cost. Why our system rather than Wowza? Our system is easier and it's got additional features that Wowza doesn't have. It's also fully API-driven. If you want to approach it via an API as opposed to a UI, you can do that. They don't spend a lot of time talking about differentiating features, but you saw a lot of the features in the demo, and they offer different packages for pricing, but our first package, as you see, starts at $299 a month. They can pretty much reach every platform that you can reach through your RTMP output.
And then Groovy Gecko, this is a British company. They're kind of a full production shop. They do everything from the camera work to the platform. They seem mostly broadcaster, large corporation and brands. Not a lot of wonderful information. They basically think they're better than hardware because they give you a lot more engagement-oriented features that you can't get in a simple hardware encoder. That's kind of the, if you boil down what it is they're saying about their product and their platform. Getting a little bit into the features that they offer, we saw some of this with Easy Live. They offer real-time clipping and DVR, yes. Graphics, text overlay, yes. Can you monetize? Yes. Pay-per-view, yes. Can you input from a smartphone? No. Do you offer DRM? Yes. They talk about the, a very rich Facebook API that includes a question moderation system and live polling. So if you're looking for as much engagement as possible from your Facebook Live viewers, I think theirs is a good platform for considering.
How does their pricing work? They're a full-service producer, but they start at around £3,000 per event, and these are the different platforms that they can reach. They can reach Facebook Live via multiple Facebook Live pages and profiles simultaneously. Not all services can do that. YouTube Live in both standard and Live 360. Periscope, yes. They also have their own branded player, but they don't have a page in their service where people can go to views. They're not like Livestream in that respect.
Related Articles
Jan Ozer discusses the leading web services for delivering a stream to multiple outputs--Technologies for Live Streaming to Multiple Platforms--and the key differentiating factors between them--in this clip from Live Streaming Summit.
09 Oct 2017
Companies and Suppliers Mentioned