Wowza Offers Friction Free Flash

• By Liam Eagle, November 19, 2008

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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- For all the considerable influence of streaming media on web content these days, hosting providers don't seem to have had the opportunity to evolve with the technology.

While Windows Media streaming service is a relatively widespread hosting offering, hosts seem to have been slower to adopt Flash streaming technology, even as it has become a major part of video content distribution.

A reason for that, suspects David Stubenvoll, CEO of Flash media streaming server developer Wowza Media Systems (www.wowzamedia.com), might be the somewhat prohibitive cost of setting up full-featured Flash streaming servers.

Wowza's answer, says Stubenvoll, is last week's launch of the company's "friction free" licensing with its Wowza Media Server Pro Subscription Edition software, a setup designed specifically for CDN, streaming services and hosting providers.

"What we've found is that folks are very interested in matching their expenses to their revenue," says Stubenvoll. "And the ability to take something from a capital expenditure, in terms of perpetual licenses, over to an operating expense, with a subscription licensing, was very interesting."

Wowza's Flash streaming server software began, he says, with a 2005 effort to produce a customer-facing media project. The company's founders discovered that existing streaming media software didn't meet its needs and set out to develop a server of its own. The company kept receiving requests from other companies that wanted to buy the program for their own use. So it designed Wowza as a commercial product, to provide something streaming users could rely on, and plug into existing systems.

Wowza was architected as a product from the ground up to be a piece of infrastructure," says Stubenvoll. "To be an industrial strength server. And with the loads people are seeing today, unless a product is designed to handle that load, it's becoming a real problem."

In the streaming media world, that single-mindedness has served Wowza well. In 2008, Wowza Media Server Pro was named the number one media server by the readers of Streaming Media Magazine - Stubenvoll points out that Adobe and Microsoft were the others in the top three.

According to the Wowza press materials, the software is fully compatible with the most recent edition of the Flash player, and exceeds the features of the Adobe Flash Media Interactive server at a considerably lower price. Stubenvoll says the server can provide live and on-demand streaming on a Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris or Unix platform, and can ingest material encoded in a long list of formats.

"In addition to being on a Java platform," he says, "which gives us great extensibility, we've added the ability to take in audio and video in a wide variety of formats. So we can take the SHOUTcast protocol and send that to Flash. The advantage here is you don't need to rely on a proprietary Flash live encoder. Basically, anything that can encode H.264 can talk to Wowza. And that's been a significant benefit for us, and makes it easier for our customers to do business."

The full (Wowza-weighted) feature comparison is long, and can be found on the company's website.

The company's interest in providing something for the service provider market, says Stubenvoll, began with a relationship with Amazon's EC2 service. The company partnered with Amazon to offer a service that packaged Wowza licensing with EC2 services, including machine time and bandwidth. The result was a single bill from Amazon for the Wowza licensing, hosting and bandwidth.

"So we decided to take that subscription licensing from EC2 and offer it to everybody that wants to use their own hosting and bandwidth for whatever purpose," says Stubenvoll. "And that is the friction free subscription that we describe."

The friction-free pricing - proper name Wowza Media Server Pro Subscription Edition - starts with a $65 up-front signup fee, which is then applied to the first instance of the software. The next three instances are $55, the following six are $50 and prices continue to decrease as volume increase. So the cost to the service provider rises and falls month-to-month as they add or lose users - similar to a reseller offering.

When it comes to pricing their own services, Stubenvoll says hosts are still figuring out how best to generate revenue from Wowza - by offering it at a mark-up, or by packaging it into a premium service as a value-add. It may be too early to say for sure what the predominant model will be.

"My guess," he says, "is that it's going to be similar to the way folks are offering Windows Media today, which is that they're a little bit all over the board. They may offer some Windows Media streaming with the package you have, and then if you're going to use a lot, that ends up being at an additional cost."

Stubenvoll says Wowza, while well known in devoted media streaming circles, has a lot of awareness to gain in the hosting market. He says the company's goal at this point is to learn more from hosts about what exactly they need, and seek to meet those needs.

"I think we've got a significant opportunity there to increase awareness," he says, "and to figure out what they want and deliver it to them."

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