Buyers’ Guide to Live Streaming Platforms
By Adam Noyes
Live streaming has become an absolute essential to business, education, government and houses of worship.
However, there is a massive amount of options for picking your favorite live streaming destination. Streamingmedia.com recently posted a great guide to live streaming platforms. Check out some highlights, below.
This buyers’ guide identifies common live-streaming use cases and suggests the features to look for and the services to consider for those use cases. I’ll be focusing on services that transcode for traditional adaptive bitrate (ABR) delivery via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) or DASH and not low-latency services for WebRTC or similar technologies. If your use case is not listed (we couldn’t get them all), find one that’s close in scale and the required feature set.
Note that the list of services is not meant to be exhaustive, so if you’re a reader, you should start with those listed and search for similar companies. If you’re a service provider and your service wasn’t listed, or it wasn’t listed for a particular use case, please add it in the comments below.
You’re a Social Media Marketer, and you want to Reach Your Viewers where they Live: Facebook and YouTube.
Social media has undeniable appeal, and as platforms, Facebook and YouTube are undeniably robust. But using them as your primary streaming platform for mission-critical events is problematic for multiple reasons, most importantly the lack of accessible technical support. Most of the live-streaming platforms I will discuss can syndicate streams to various social media platforms, and originating your streams with a commercial service is the best strategy.
You’re a broadcaster seeking live transcoding services.
You’ve got the content management, player, and delivery ecosystem nailed; you just want affordable high-quality transcoding and packaging. Companies to consider include AWS Elemental, Bitmovin, Microsoft Azure, Mux, StreamGuys, Wowza, and Brightcove Zencoder.