Wowza Media Systems Rolls Out New Streaming Engine for Apple Low-Latency HLS Specifications

For engineers and developers who need to build an end-to-end low-latency solution, Wowza Streaming Engine has announced support for the most recent Apple Low-Latency HLS specification. This allows users o deliver high-quality, scalable, low-latency streaming to any device using player applications supporting LL-HLS.

As an enhancement to the widely adopted HLS protocol, Apple’s Low-Latency HLS — the new and emerging standard — is expected to have wide industry adoption because streaming applications still require a reliable stream with scaled distribution, but users want to take advantage of the many benefits of low latency. Vendor support is currently limited, however, and is required across the entire workflow — from origin to deployment — in order to transcode, repackage, scale, and play HLS streams with low latency. As an early adopter, Wowza is driving the industry forward through integration with CDNs and web players.

“We are excited to continue to optimize Low-Latency HLS in Wowza Streaming Engine and bring these new capabilities to the industry,” said David Stubenvoll, CEO of Wowza Media Systems. “Our customers have always been very creative in the new and transformative ways they use live streaming to change the world. Vendor-supported Low-Latency HLS only means more development, creativity, and user adoption — especially during this time of digital innovation.”

With this release, Wowza Streaming Engine can now provide the processing step for Low-Latency HLS workflows, and it’s compatible with pull-based CDNs and player applications supporting LL-HLS. This will help drive the industry to production implementations of Low-Latency HLS in large-scale, multidevice deployments.

If customers are looking for supported end-to-end technologies, Wowza has worked very closely with Fastly CDN and THEOplayer, to create a proven workflow for glass-to-glass delivery. The added support from these partners allows users to scale to large global audiences and reach beyond Apple device users to stream to all devices.

Finally, the new changes make it possible to deliver streams in under two seconds using only Wowza Streaming Engine, so users can experience the quality, scalability, and flexibility of traditional HLS — but faster.