The NEW! Wowza ClearCaster Appliances feature new hardware designed for and built with the new Wowza Cloud ClearCaster Orchestration software

Powerful, Portable, and
Professional

TheClearCaster Micro is a portable live streaming encoder packed with features. Ideal for live event producers in the field, the all-in-one Micro provides a reliable, cost-efficient way to stream broadcast-quality video to any destination. 

ClearCaster Micro custom built hardware encoder with pre-loaded Wowza Cloud Orchestration software with 1-year subscription.

#WCCMICRO1YR
$2,125.00 MSRP

Key Features

• Small and lightweight for on-the-go encoding
• Powerful mini-work station; perfect for challenging network conditions and locations
• Controlled by Wowza Cloud Orchestration API
• Supports Custom Wowza Linux environment
• Local and cloud recording and storage capabilities

Enterprise-Class
Reliability

The ClearCaster Enterprise is purpose-built for data centers and production teams, the fully redundant and scalable solution simplifies the streaming workflow and delivers next-generation video performance to any broadcast environment. 

ClearCaster Enterprise rack-mountable custom built hardware encoder with pre-loaded Wowza Cloud Orchestration software with 3-year subscription.

#WCCENT3YR
$5,375.00 MSRP

Key Features

• Reliable 4K video delivery
• Enterprise-class components
• Rack-mountable; comes with pre-installed kit
• Controlled by Wowza Cloud Orchestration API
• Supports Custom Wowza Linux environment
• Local and cloud recording and storage capabilities

What Is Wowza Cloud Orchestration?

Designed with a cloud-first approach and back-end management, Wowza Cloud Orchestration lets you take control of your streaming encoder fleet from anywhere in the world. Prebuilt using proven Wowza technology, Wowza Cloud Orchestration simplifies the most difficult parts of the encoding workflow — saving you time and lowering overhead costs. With Wowza Cloud Orchestration, you can manage thousands of streams with a scalable API, or build your own architecture on top of our cloud-optimized back-end infrastructure.

Wowza Cloud Orchestration software is included with the ClearCaster hardware.
ClearCaster Micro includes 1-year and Enterprise includes 3-years.
You may extend and renew those subscriptions for $750/year with #SK-00000311

Check out this article from Wowza, about how to use your ClearCaster with multiple different software.

From home, from the office, or even from the home office, more live streams are being broadcast today than at any other time in streaming media’s two-decade history.

One reason for this is the relative ease of software solutions through which a live broadcast can be streamed. But the choices can seem a bit overwhelming, especially to those who are new to the whole concept of streaming.

Live encoding software is essential for compressing your video feed and editing it on the fly, but the best fit depends on your unique broadcast. A wide range of streaming software can be integrated with Wowza’s full-service platform, so let’s take a closer look.

What Is Your Workflow?

The first question to think about when considering a live broadcast tool (or even a toolbox of multiple software titles) isn’t the software features. It’s the workflow in which you’ll be using the broadcast tools.

By workflow I first mean business questions about monetization as well as creative questions around the format — will it be a single-personality, single-camera approach, or will it involve in-house or remote co-hosts and guests — and the intended audience.

While these are business and creative questions, not technical ones, they still need to be answered before you choose streaming broadcast software. Otherwise you’ll spend a frustrating amount of time compromising your vision with software that wasn’t intended for the type of broadcast you want to present to the world.

At best, you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time trying to bend your technical workflow to your creative one, and more than likely you’ll give up in frustration without realizing you needed a “wrench” when all you had was a “hammer” at your disposal.

Once you’ve addressed the business and creative workflow questions, then it’s time to turn your attention to the proper software tools for the job. Since there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to live streaming broadcasting, we’ll use a few examples of typical broadcast scenarios.

One to Many

If you’re doing a solo broadcasting gig, there are a wide set of options, mostly differentiated by the level of production value and number of cameras.

For instance, if you just want to broadcast an event from a single, stationary camera, there are a number of software applications for your Android or iOS smartphone or tablet that can do the trick. You’ll probably be unable to do lower-thirds graphics (titles at the bottom of the screen) or crawls (a ticker-type band at the very bottom of the screen with key information or breaking news) using these applications, but you will be able to broadcast live to a reasonably sized audience with no more effort than naming your stream and clicking the “broadcast” button.

Here’s a personal example: I got married about two days before the start of the COVID-19 self-isolation mandates. Since we’d had friends and members of the wedding party from abroad who couldn’t attend due to border closings, we proactively disinvited a number of our elderly or immuno-compromised friends and began searching for a way to stream the ceremony.

Working in the streaming industry doesn’t necessarily make it easier to think through the workflow of something as important as your own wedding, but my fiancée and I were looking for an easy-to-implement option that didn’t require much configuration or headache. We considered Facebook Live and a few social media live-streaming apps, but didn’t want to limit viewing to those with accounts. We ultimately went with IBM Video Cloud after an industry friend offered a temporary account.

This worked well for our one-to-many broadcast. That said, it might not have been our one-stop solution if we were looking for real-time interactivity and advanced mixing.

Check out the full article HERE.

Learn more about Wowza HERE.

DENVER, Sept. 10, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Wowza Media Systems, the market leader in reliable streaming infrastructure solutions that enable applications to deliver to any device for any purpose, today announced the company’s extensive footprint at IBC2019, the industry’s most influential media, entertainment and technology event. The five-day Conference and Exhibition will be held on Sept. 13-17 at the RAI Convention Centre in Amsterdam.

“This year’s conference theme — putting consumers first — aligns perfectly with our new offering: Wowza Professional Services. This launch ensures our customers are successfully leveraging our live-streaming solutions and cements our position as an industry leader,” said David Stubenvoll, CEO and co-founder of Wowza Media Systems. “As the media industry continues its evolution, we are incredibly proud to be on par with some of the world’s top tech companies, and our massive presence this year in Amsterdam only highlights our capacity for innovation and our customers’ appetite for cutting-edge technology.”

Wowza’s main exhibition stand will be located in the “Content Everywhere” section of IBC (Hall 14.E08), and the company will have an additional presence at the Microsoft, Google and Facebook stands.

Powerful Partnerships With Microsoft, Google and Facebook

At the Microsoft stand (Hall 1.C27), Wowza will be demonstrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities for video object detection in live streaming using the Microsoft Cognitive Learning platform.

Additionally, as co-founder of the SRT Alliance, Wowza will be demonstrating the Wowza Hublet in both the Microsoft and Wowza stands. As part of the SRT Hub Partner Program, Wowza provides a framework to develop input, output and processing modules. With SRT Hub, global media workflows connecting vendors and spanning multiple Microsoft Azure data centers and broadcast services can be defined, orchestrated and launched within minutes.

Charlie Good, Wowza CTO and co-founder, will also join professionals from Haivision to participate in a panel titled “Broadcast Production in the Cloud With SRT Hub and Microsoft Azure.” The panel, which will cover SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) — an alternative to proprietary video transport technologies that is designed to address the shortcomings of internet-based video contribution systems — will be held on Sunday, Sept. 15 at 4:00 p.m. in Hall 14, Room G104.

As a preferred Google partner, Wowza will have representation in Google’s Partner Pavilion located in their stand (Hall 14.E01) during the conference. Additionally, James Sherry, Wowza senior product manager, will present “Reimagine Live Streaming With Wowza Streaming Cloud on Google Cloud.” The presentation will take place at 2 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 13 in the Google In-Booth Theater (Hall 14.E01).

Finally, Facebook will have a live production studio powered by the Wowza ClearCaster Pro live encoding appliance in their stand (Hall 14.B31). By relying on Wowza to deliver the highest-quality stream possible, Facebook will create live content from the floor of IBC for an amazing user experience on Facebook Live. Additionally, Anthony Lazaro, senior director of product management, and Charlie Good, CTO and co-founder of Wowza, will discuss the latest advancements of ClearCaster Pro and how it delivers broadcast-quality video to Facebook Live in the Facebook Live studio on Saturday, Sept. 14 at 11:00 a.m.

From TechCrunch

LinkedIn — the social network for the working world with close to 600 million users globally — says that video is the fastest-growing format on its platform alongside original written work, shared news and other content. Now it’s taking its next step in the medium in earnest.

This week, the company is launching live video, giving people and organizations the ability to broadcast real-time video to select groups, or to the LinkedIn  world at large.

Launching in beta first in the U.S., LinkedIn Live (as the product is called) will be invite-only. In coming weeks, LinkedIn will also post a contact form for others who want to get in on the action. It’s not clear when and if LinkedIn will make it possible for everyone to create LinkedIn Live videos, but if you consider how it developed its publishing features for written work, that will come later, too.

Initial live content that LinkedIn hopes to broadcast lines up with the kind of subject matter you might already see in LinkedIn’s news feed: the plan is to cover conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by influencers and mentors, office hours from a big tech company, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies and more.

And to underscore how LinkedIn is keen to develop this — especially in its first phase — not as rough-and-ready user-generated content, but as streams of the kinds of videos that fit with its wider ethos, it has selected several third-party developers of live broadcasting streaming services that creators will work with to create and post more polished live video on LinkedIn.

These include Wirecast, Switcher Studio, Wowza Media Systems, Socialive and Brandlive, “with more to come in the following weeks,” LinkedIn said.

There is another technical partner for LinkedIn’s live video effort, too: Microsoft, whose Azure Media Services, part of its cloud division, is providing encoding. Although Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, it has mostly kept a distance in terms of knitting together product development between the two, so this is a notable exception. Skype, incidentally, is not part of this video effort.

Better late than never?

Compared to its competitors in the social networking sphere, LinkedIn has been a late bloomer when it comes to video.

Amid developments from competitors like Twitter and Facebook going back years to bring more engagement to its platforms with the use of moving pictures, the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn introduced its first native video features only in the summer of 2017.

But in the 17 months since launching video features, LinkedIn has seen a big boost in traffic and revenues from (non-live) video on its platform.

“Video is the fastest growing format on our platform right now, and the one most likely to get people talking,” said Pete Davies, the director of product management at LinkedIn. He and LinkedIn declined to give specific figures in terms of how many video creators or viewers there are, except to note that “millions” of LinkedIn members have used the feature.

Davies said that live video has been a big request — not least, I’d wager, because it is such a prominent part of how video is being used on other social platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, putting the functionality front of mind.

“Live has been the most requested feature,” he said. These other social platforms are serving as a template of sorts: as with these other platforms, users can “like” videos as they are being broadcast, with the likes floating along the screen. Viewers can ask questions or make suggestions in the comments in real time. Hosts can moderate those comments in real time, too, to remove harassing or other messages, Davies added.

There may be another reason beyond user requests for why LinkedIn is expanding video: it’s proving to be a strong engine for engagement and revenue growth at the company.

So far, the only monetization that LinkedIn has introduced around video is for video advertising. While Microsoft does not break out how much LinkedIn brings in in advertising revenues, much less video advertising, Microsoft reported in its last quarterly earnings that revenues at LinkedIn were up 29 percent, with a reference to growing its ads business specifically: “with record levels of engagement highlighted by LinkedIn sessions growth of 30 percent.”

That, it seems, is directly coming from its video products: LinkedIn tells me that video ads earn 30 percent more comments per impression than non-video ads and that LinkedIn members spend almost three times more time watching video ads compared to time spent with static Sponsored Content.

With LinkedIn looking at tapping into unique content with LinkedIn Live, there is a clear opportunity for the company to explore other ways of monetizing the content beyond ads. For example, it could charge viewers for unique experiences like conferences, or make certain Live events part of the company’s paid tier to lure in more premium subscribers. On the part of the broadcasters, it could potentially provide fee-based services to provide a platform to broadcast certain content like video-based earnings reports.

LinkedIn wouldn’t comment on future monetization plans, and for now isn’t even putting video ads into LinkedIn Live videos. “That will come down the road, but for right now we are focused on awesome use cases,” said Peter Roybal, head of video product management, in an interview. “This could even be a way to try out some new ideas.”

From Wowza

Built for Professional Productions.

1. Simulcast with ClearCaster

Facebook Live may be the world’s top live-streaming platform—but it isn’t the only platform. ClearCaster now enables simulcasting functionality through integration with our industry-leading Wowza Streaming Cloud service. Just use the advanced configuration settings in Wowza Streaming Cloud to perform a one-time setup of your preferred destinations, and you’ll be able to stream to multiple devices and platforms in one click.

2. Highest Quality on Facebook Live

Wowza ClearCaster now offers all users publishing access to the premium transcoding tier of Facebook Live. This tier offers more reliability and quality than the consumer side of Facebook Live by publishing via two additional output renditions (1080p and 144p), as well as support for up to 60fps video. Publish on the infrastructure Facebook built for premium content providers.

3. Free Titling & Graphics

Use any browser-based source with ClearCaster to add professional production and branding to your broadcast. Wowza has partnered with Vidpresso to create the perfect social streaming graphics. Use the standard packages for free, or pay a small one-time fee to have Vidpresso create a fully customized graphics package.

4. More Stream Health Metrics

ClearCaster now integrates with Facebook stream health to give you a full view of the first mile. New health monitoring metrics include real-time bitrate performance both coming out of the appliance as well as being ingested into Facebook.

Learn more about the Wowza here

Recently, I was supporting our CEO, Dave Stubenvoll, by providing an onsite customer demonstration of the Wowza ClearCaster appliance. Suddenly, right in the middle of our session, Dave intentionally pulled the 120-volt power cord from the unit.

While maintaining composure, on the inside, I was freaking out! In my mind, I screamed, “Dave, why would you do that?!”

What I didn’t yet realize was that the Wowza ClearCaster device is designed to automatically resume streaming when power is restored. This incident, while terrifying, actually showcased the resiliency of our ClearCaster hardware, and how it can consistently recover from a power outage.

The Fault-Tolerant Server Keeps Going, and Going…

In most instances, removing power—or disrupting a physical server in any capacity—is a very bad idea. Candidly, even having witnessed the ability of our branded hardware to recover from loss of power, the idea of showing that off in an on-site demo makes me a little nervous. Most of us in the industry shy away from “messing around” with a server once it’s up and running.

My friend, Richie Murray with Bridge Digital, would certainly disagree with me. Over a period of months, I had been running into Richie at various industry events, where he kept trying to get me excited me about a “fault-tolerant server” that he was convinced would be perfect for streaming. He claimed to have this device that would “keep on going” when any primary component became compromised during operation.

It sounded like a great idea, but I wasn’t sold. Prior to working with ClearCaster, I’ve worked with people all over the world, in every aspect of the industry, and have never encountered a situation where a media server could be compromised, yet “keep on going.”

Video streaming is complex and resource-intensive. The thought of a server maintaining a transcoding and packaging workflow—to a maximum scale—while losing a hard disk, power supply or motherboard component sounded very far-fetched to me. But then again, Richie is a stand-up guy, and I realized he may be onto something… read more

Biola University is a private Christian college in the Los Angeles area, with about 6,500 students across eight schools. In addition to broadcasting lectures, seminars and other educational content, Biola creates marketing videos to attract new students to attend.

Since many soon-to-be college students spend a lot of time on Facebook, this is a natural platform for Biola to use to share videos about what life is like on campus. The Wowza ClearCaster appliance offers an easy way to start streaming this content on Facebook to massive audiences of prospective students around the world. The ClearCaster workflow is also much simpler and more reliable than the previous setup Biola was using, which involved many pieces of equipment and manual encoder configuration.

In this video from the 2018 NAB Show, David Baxter, assistant director of video production at Biola, explains how ClearCaster has improved their Facebook Live streaming workflow and allowed them to engage with more prospective students more easily: click here to see the video

With this update, ClearCaster offers titling, redundancy in the Manager UI, features to create even better broadcasts, and more:

1. Titling & Graphics

The Wowza ClearCaster appliance now supports titling and graphics. Use any browser-based source with ClearCaster to add professional production and branding to your broadcast. Need help creating browser-based graphics? Wowza has partnered with Vidpresso to create the perfect social streaming graphics.

2. Redundancy in Manager

Bulletproof your broadcast by adding a redundant ClearCaster appliance to your workflow. With just one click, Wowza will automatically establish a redundant connection to Facebook, including encoding configuration, synchronization, and automated fail-over in case your primary connection goes down.

3. Rotated Vertical

Engage with Facebook Live in 1080p using the native social format of vertical video. Use your existing professional equipment to shoot sideways in the 16:9 format, and ClearCaster will rotate the video to 9:16.

4. Live Donate

Add the ability to ask viewers to donate to verified 501(c)(3) causes during your live stream. This API-only feature is now available to anyone broadcasting live with Wowza ClearCaster.

5. Other Enhancements

Even more features have been added to Wowza ClearCaster Manager. These include the ability to start simulcasting to Wowza Streaming Cloud while in preview, as well as a network-configuration tool to help you manually set an IP address and DNS and to debug your network connection.
For more information on release 1.0.4.17, visit these articles:

• Release Notes
• Add Titling and Graphics to a Broadcast
• How to Manage Network IP Settings
• Setup Redundant ClearCaster Live Streams

WOWZA CLEARCASTER SOFTWARE VERSION 1.0.3.10 IS NOW AVAILABLE ON ALL DEVICES!

With this update, ClearCaster offers exciting new features to create even more utility, including:

1. Simulcast to Any Destination
Facebook Live may be the world’s top live-streaming platform—but it isn’t the only platform. With the latest update, ClearCaster enables simulcasting functionality through integration with our industry-leading Wowza Streaming Cloud service. Just use the advanced configuration settings in Wowza Streaming Cloud to perform a one-time setup of your preferred destinations, and you’ll be able to stream to multiple devices and platforms in one click.

* Try it now by signing up for a Wowza Streaming Cloud trial.

2. Manage All Your Broadcasts in One Interface
For video professionals who have to schedule multiple broadcasts, managing them all can be a bit tricky. With the new Broadcast View in ClearCaster Manager, you can adjust the encoding resources; title and description; and stream targets for each live stream. This new feature will also allow you to start and stop streams from directly within the Broadcast View for greater control.

3. Audience Restriction for Targeted Broadcasts
While Facebook Live allows you to share your live stream with the entire world, sometimes that audience size is more than you need. Wowza ClearCaster now supports Facebook’s Audience Restriction functionality, which allows you to limit the visibility of Facebook Live posts only to audience members who meet your specific criteria for location, age and/or gender.

Geographic restrictions can be set at the country, state or locality level, so you can target coverage to as narrow or as broad an audience as you need. Setting up Audience Restrictions is quick and easy with the ClearCaster Manager UI.

Automatic Update to Version 1.0.3.10

Unlike previous ClearCaster software updates, version 1.0.3.10 will automatically update on appliances. The release window will be on June 14th between 7:00 a.m. MST and 8:00 a.m. MST.

If ClearCaster is powered on during the release window, the update will load automatically. However, if ClearCaster is powered down during the release window, the software will load the next time ClearCaster is powered on.

For more information, visit these articles:

Release Notes
Simulcast Documents