Wowza Streaming Engine

Wowza Streaming Engine runs live and on-demand video inside your own Azure subscription. You control the virtual machines, the network configuration and the data. Software is billed hourly through Azure with no separate Wowza license purchase, and there are no per-stream, per-viewer or per-rendition fees.

Most streaming servers will start a test stream quickly. Getting to production is the harder part. Every deployment here includes a Wowza StreamLock TLS certificate, origin and edge scale-out, the DRM and encryption modules, Wowza Streaming Engine Manager for monitoring, and Standard support, rather than leaving you to assemble them afterward.

WebRTC and open standards

Wowza Streaming Engine implements WebRTC to the W3C and IETF specifications, with WHIP for ingest and WHEP for playback. You can publish from OBS Studio, FFmpeg, or hardware encoders from Osprey, Teradek, AJA and Haivision, and play back in any standards-compliant client, without a vendor SDK or a proprietary signaling protocol. Signaling runs over ordinary HTTP, so it sits behind a standard Azure load balancer without session affinity configuration. You can also configure your own STUN and TURN servers for enterprise, government and air-gapped deployments.

Protocols

• Ingest: WHIP, WebRTC, SRT, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, MPEG-TS, UDP
• Delivery: WHEP, WebRTC, LL-HLS, HLS, MPEG-DASH, RTMP
• DRM: Widevine, FairPlay, PlayReady
• Security: token authentication, AES encryption, TLS, audit logging

One deployment handles interactive streaming over sub-second WebRTC, scheduled events and OTT with adaptive bitrate and live-stream DVR, and camera fleets over RTSP at density. You do not need separate products, operators or training for each.

Included with every VM

• Unlimited transcoding, with no per-stream, per-viewer or per-rendition charges and no metered minutes
• DRM for Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady
• Live-stream DVR, so viewers can pause, rewind and catch up
• A Wowza StreamLock TLS certificate for securing playback
• GPU-accelerated transcoding with NVIDIA NVENC on Turing-generation or newer GPUs
• REST and Java APIs, custom server-side modules, and webhooks for stream-health events
• Confidence monitoring and alerting you can route into your own observability stack

Running on Azure

• Origin and edge topologies on Virtual Machine Scale Sets, with any CDN caching from an HTTP origin on your Wowza instance
• On-demand content served from Azure Blob Storage through Wowza MediaCache
• Official Wowza Docker images, if you would rather run in containers
• Hourly billing through your Azure subscription, with BYOL plans available if you already hold a Wowza license

If you are moving off Azure Media Services, this covers live ingest, transcoding, packaging, DVR and DRM in one deployment.

Track record

Wowza Streaming Engine has been in production for twenty years and is deployed across more than 170 countries by Fortune 500 enterprises, broadcasters and government agencies. Wowza maintains a SOC 2 Type II report covering its internal controls and safeguards, and holds ISO [FILL IN STANDARD NUMBER]. State transportation agencies use it to ingest 1,300 or more RTSP traffic cameras. Auction platforms and sportsbooks use it for sub-second interactive video.

Support

Standard support is included with every deployment, with a 48-hour response target on weekdays. Three upgrades are available.

• Silver: 8-hour response, weekdays, with live chat
• Gold: 2-hour response, 24x7x365, with one live event support session
• Platinum: 30-minute response, 24x7x365, with a dedicated account owner and four live event sessions

Wowza Design Center provides architecture review, performance tuning and custom module development from certified streaming engineers.

Choosing a VM size

Use general-purpose D-series for delivery and pass-through work, or compute-optimized F-series where CPU is the constraint, starting at 4 vCPUs. For transcoding-heavy work, use an NVIDIA-accelerated N-series size carrying a Turing-generation or newer GPU. As a planning reference measured on a Tesla T4, one GPU sustains roughly 60 transcoded 1080p30 outputs, and about half that at 1080p60. For delivery-heavy work, pick a size with accelerated networking and egress headroom above peak viewers.

Getting started

1. Deploy the prebuilt Wowza VM image. The streaming ports you need are opened as part of the deployment.
2. Sign in to Wowza Streaming Engine Manager and set your credentials.
3. Publish your first stream. Most deployments are live in minutes.