Wowza Media Systems Unveils New Ultra Low Latency Service

Wowza Media Systems has unveiled a new Ultra Low Latency Service as a part of the Wowza Streaming Cloud platform. Built on top of Microsoft Azure, the global cloud computing infrastructure, this service will deliver live-streaming at the ideal speed and scale. The Wowza Ultra Low Latency Service combines streaming software with intelligent monitoring and management, reliably delivering streams across the globe with less than two seconds of end-to-end latency.

“Our new Ultra Low Latency Service makes it possible to deliver consistent user experiences around the world, with streams that start instantly, don’t buffer and rarely drop—regardless of existing network conditions,” says Dave Stubenvoll, CEO and co-founder at Wowza Media Systems. “Unlike legacy networks, our new platform is designed to deliver at the speed needed for the next generation of applications and services, so it doesn’t cache and won’t artificially inject latency based on demand or scale.”

“A lot of companies are building really complex systems that are hard to manage, offer little function and have an extremely high total cost of ownership,” says Kedar Mohite, Senior Analyst, Media Technology Services at Ovum. “The Wowza Ultra Low Latency Service presents a really simplified model for media distribution that not only not only enhances multi-screen reach, but also streamlines the workflow complexities.”

Global Footprint for Elastic Scalability
Deployed on Microsoft Azure data centers, with the most global POPs and nodes, the new platform automatically detects the closest ingest point and delivers through a single, unified network—reducing hops to the last mile. With intelligent load-balancing and scaling, the network immediately provides the streaming resources needed to deliver reliable, consistent experiences to audiences of any size.

Our service further leverages innovative technologies, including the WOWZA video transport protocol and WebSockets, to dramatically reduce time-to-first-frame and end-to-end latency.

Intelligent Management, Monitoring, Self-Healing and Auto-Scaling
The Wowza Ultra Low Latency Service offers real-time monitoring and self-healing functionality, ensuring enterprise-level redundancy, stability and uptime. Its automatic optimization capabilities rapidly identify potential issues and proactively adjust settings to provide quality performance.

With these tools, the service offers greater visibility, insight and control throughout the entire streaming workflow: from ingest to playback. This allows it to anticipate errors, tune and optimize streams or roll over to the nearest available data center to maintain uptime.

 Developer Toolkit for Interactive End-to-End Streaming Workflows
Today’s streaming applications deliver more than just video. Our API-based service allows developers to create interactive, real-time experiences that bring viewers and broadcasters together through synced, bi-directional video and data. The new platform provides a proven developer framework with comprehensive APIs that let developers quickly move from the source code on their laptop to a worldwide, scalable service.

The API toolkit built for streaming includes:

• Interactive documentation, as well as API and custom application samples.
• Rich SDKs for developing professional-grade, custom mobile streaming apps.

Wowza will demonstrate the full capabilities of the new Ultra Low Latency Service during the 2017 International Broadcasters Convention and Expo, September 14-19, in Amsterdam, Netherlands.