Best Practices for Streaming Ingest and Distribution

Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media East Connect, How to Optimize Your Live Streaming Workflow on the Streaming Media YouTube channel.

Learn more about live streaming ingest and distribution at Streaming Media West 2020.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Robert Reinhardt: Most people here are aware of the different protocols we can ingest with RTMP, RTSP, SRT, or WebRTC. And typically you need that to be consumed by an origin. Among other things, that's going to translate that video into multiple bitrates, distributed to edges and on whatever cloud platform that you're using. This is just a quick illustration of all the facets that can go into that. Typically, though, my live streaming deployment, especially when I do live webcasts ... I do a lot of live streaming where I show up with my gear, and especially now with COVID restrictions ... I was just approached by a school to livestream their graduation ceremonies at the end of this month. And so they're going to have social distancing and a big field. They're going to have a stage. I'm going to show up with cameras, video switchers, and probably wearing a mask and gloves on top of it.

But in those kinds of architectures, that's greatly simplified. I'm going to most likely push over RTMP into a media server, that is going to be distributed by a cheaper cloud distribution service. In this case, I have CloudFront in my diagram and the subscriber in this case is going to be ingesting an HLS stream.

Now, getting down to gear, I'm a big fan of the AJA Helo. Videon has some really great equipment that has been on the market for a couple of years now. And again, you probably already have some H.264 encoders, maybe an HEVC encoder in your arsenal already. Any of that gear can apply. You're pushing those RTMP streams into an ingest, and you can use any off-the-shelf player--JW Player, Bitmovin, Video.js, Mux--that has an HLS renderer. And it can go ahead and play that stream.