Streaming services

I have had recurring issues streaming our services. Can we compare notes?

We just moved to streammonkey.com, worked great to start with having issues now. Not able to rule out hardware or the network just yet. We just updated to an AT&T 150Mb IPFlex internet connection. We are in a more rural area, AT&T is the currently the only provider, Verizon & CSpire do not exist as an option yet.

  1. do you have a dedicated internet line for streaming only
  2. who is your streaming provider (streammonkey, someone else?)
  3. is your server in something like a dmz off your firewall if not on a dedicated line
  4. how many hops from your firewall is your streaming hardware
  5. your bandwidth to internet

thank you all for the help. When someone gets travel details to the national event, please post them.

rush

My experience with StreamMonkey was not very positive. They ran their ingest service in AWS and didn’t seem to have a real solid handle on networking, and their system couldn’t accommodate VBR/ABR or any reasonable profile levels. In my experience, they aren’t able to deliver a stream that doesn’t show very heavy artifacting and support wasn’t terribly responsive.

thanks Alex. what do you use instead for streaming

That customer switched to Livestream.com and didn’t look back.

150Mbps should be plenty of bandwidth over a Fiber connection like that. Many of our churches have 50-75Mbps connections and have no issues with streaming, public wifi, etc. Of course it depends on your demands for public wifi, etc. None of our clients are using a dedicated link for streaming to the web.

Many of our clients use churchstreaming.tv. A few use livestream.com. Some use other things too, but those are the most common.

If the firewall is appropriately sized for your needs, you shouldn’t need a dedicated DMZ, firewall, or line for streaming. In some cases we disable some of the UTM features in the firewall for the streaming boxes, but honestly we don’t have to do that very often in order to maintain reliable streams.

We try to minimize hops from streaming to firewall, but it’s not uncommon to go through 2-3 switches to get there.

90% of the time when we see issues like you’re describing it’s either the streaming provider or the local firewall getting maxed out.

I hope that helps.

You can consider Haivision Makito devices for live and recorded streaming. Haivision uses an open source streaming protocol called “SRT” (SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) Protocol | Haivision) which is very reliable, compresses videos very well and ensures the quality of video remains high. We have tested it even across two continents for live streaming and amazed by the results. SRT has very good loss packet recovery. (Why We Created SRT and the Difference Between SRT and UDT)

Makito encoder and decoder now comes with HEVC which uses even lesser bandwidth (up to 50% lesser than H264) than before. We tried 8Mbps for H264 HD streaming and it was good. On HEVC I would believe it uses less than 5Mbps for HD.

US Military uses Makito products and Haivision has a focus on helping Churches.

Suggestion: You can contact the vendor to loan the Makitos for a test which was what we did.

Here is another +1 for LiveStream.com. We used churchstreaming.tv and couldn’t get the quality we wanted. Worked with support for a long time with no luck. We used the same computer and Internet connection with Live Stream and it works without a hitch. We do an HD, Medium, and Mobile Stream.