Kick start with Video Streaming

Hi Guys,

Developing a video hosting site? If yes, then you must be thinking of how to serve the multimedia content to end users.

There are a lot of ways to serve the audio/video content to end users,

• Static Download
• Progressive Download (Pseudo Streaming)
• Single Streaming (UDP, HTTP, RTSP, RTMP protocol based)
• Adaptive Streaming

There are pros and cons of these technologies as well. Some of them need expensive media servers to serve the multimedia content to end users and others may affect the user experience.

The most popular technology to serve the multimedia content is adaptive streaming.

“Adaptive streaming provides the multiple bit-rate streams to end users. Best stream get played at  user’s end, which is decide by client player on the basis of some parameters like client computational capacity (CPU), internet bandwidth and memory utilization. Adaptive streaming provides the best user experience.”

There are multiple implementations available for adaptive streaming

• Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (3GPP/MPEG-DASH)
• Microsoft Smooth Streaming
• QuavStreams Adaptive Streaming
• upLynk
• 3GPP RTSP Streaming
• Adobe HTTP Dynamic Flash Streaming (Adobe HDS)
• Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)

There are many streaming solutions present in the market. Listing some of the key solutions,

• Flumotion (Open Source)
• Gstreamer Server (Open Source)
• Nginx HLS Module (Open Source)
• FluorineFx (Open Source)
• RED5 Server (Open Source)
• UStream (Open Source)
• FFMPEG Server (Open Source)
• RealNetworks Helix Universal Server
• Microsoft IIS Media Services
• Flash Media Server
• Wowza Media Server
• SmartFoxServer
• Flussonic
• ElectroServer

If you are not interested to spend on infra, there are some cloud solutions as well, that will provide ready-to-use solutions,

• Brightcove
• Dailymotion Cloud
• Akamai
• Wowza Cloud
• livestream.com
• vidizmo.com
• iStreamPlanet
• Microsoft Azure
• Aframe
• Amazon Web Services
• Encoding.com
• Forbidden Technologies
• Haivision HyperStream
• Octoshape Cloudmass
• Sorenson
• WeVideo
• Zencoder

It was just a brief information, required while you kick start a multimedia hosting site.

Cheers!!!