Related, where do I begin to learn about live streaming/broadcasting from end-to-end?

I'm experimenting with an Apple TV project and I'd like to know (a) what has to take place to get from video camera or iOS device to an HLS stream? (b) What open source tools (if any) are available to help do this? (c) what storage/server requirements are there?

TIA

I can provide you with my contact info if you'd like, and answer any questions you may have. At my last job, I built out the VoD/live streaming infrastructure for the internet presence of a major US broadcaster.

Its pretty straightforward, just a bit of a schlep time wise depending on the scale and capabilities you're targeting.

Yeah, I'd love to get you contact info and exchange some emails. My email is in my profile.

Thanks for the information. Much appreciated.

* What do you say are the biggest challenges?

* What's the oddest problem you have had to solve while building/operating this?

Surprisingly enough:

* Politics within the organization

* Interfacing with legacy broadcast/video library systems (f* you Grass Valley, and your abomination of a video asset management system)

Serving video online is fairly straightforward, although it wasn't always. We've come a long way from RTMP and progressive HTTP downloads. With HLS, MPEG-DASH, etc, you're still moving the same bits, but you have a much better end user experience.

Netflix has original renditions for all of its content in S3, which they convert into multiple renditions based on bitrate and other video metadata, and their player then intelligently switches based on available bandwidth. Its (mostly) that easy, unless you're the White House or SpaceX streaming to millions of people at once. That's still a bit tricky, and you usually call Akamai, Limelight, or Encoding.com to solve that.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd create a small startup team (no more than 10-15 people) to create a platform that lets you white label so anyone could build their own Netflix with their own content (or licensed content) and iterate ruthlessly. Don't partner on storage or CDN, just create modules that let you plug n play based on the rates you can get (API libraries all the way down). Setup a partnership department to hook customers up with hardware vendors (Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, those folks). Keep in the front of your mind that tech is commodity but relationships are what's going to put you in tens of millions of homes.

I left because no one realized how quickly other parties in the space (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Google, etc) were innovating. We'd spend months in the weeds, with little momentum on key features. In 5-10 years, broadcast is completely dead, its airspace auctioned off to cellular providers. This does not get through to traditional broadcast folks.

Nice insights!

Interesting fact on your approach: at bitmovin we do exactly that, we've our bitcodin.com encoding service and our bitdash players (www.dash-player.com), which can plug into any cloud storage, CDN, wtc., we've quite a lot interfaces and tutorials for that. We see us as kind of Stripe for video.

I'm working on something in this space. Can you pass along your contact info? I'd love to pick your brain a bit. If you'd prefer, you can contact me at mshockley@neptunemediagroup.com

Thanks for the insight.

I can't edit my original reply, apologies for a bit of an offtopic tangent. This fits your project's requirements: https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module

You'll either want to push your HLS segments to S3 or a CDN if you want to persist them, or serve them directly off Nginx, depending on your audience size.

look into gstreamer. The HLS segmenter is kind of crap, but will handle basic stuff with no problems. It has bindings for python among others.

I'm working on a better one and hopefully I can convince my client to push it to up stream.

You can drop us a line at support@bitmovin.com, maybe we can help

I wouldn't say this is my own Twitch, more like paying for someone else's Twitch that you can host on your own page.

It also enables adaptive streaming in HTML5 without Flash, as used by Netflix or YouTube already

Looking on their site it looks like the player requires flash.

This example is HTML5:

http://www.dash-player.com/

I was looking into similar projects recently. The one you linked certainly seems to be the best option right now, however it's worth noting that there is also the DASH IF (Industry Forum) reference player[1], and JW Player[2] also offers support for a HTML5 DASH player.

I believe support for HTML5 media extensions was added to Firefox 42, and has been around in other browsers for a while.

1. http://dashif.org/reference/players/javascript/

2. http://www.jwplayer.com/innovation/roadmap/mpeg-dash/

I've been really interested in doing something like this. I want to improve my home streaming setup, trying to work in multiple web cameras and game perspectives, while co-broadcasting to Youtube and Twitch.

I've tried a few things, right now I have my dedicated home server acting as a RTMP relay for my webcam to stream into my 2nd PC where my girlfriend is playing games / streaming, but the latency is unbearable and my video is 5-10s behind what I'm saying.

Was hoping this could be a solution, but it doesn't look like it. I don't like the pricing model, and the video player STILL requires flash.

Please do not add allow domain "*" into your crossdomain.xml EVER unless on a CDN domain (a domain specifically for hosting a CDN) or serving static files. This breaks SOP.

Why does bitdash require Flash? I tried to use it (Firefox 38 on Linux) but it says:

"No supported technology was detected, i.e. neither Flash nor the MediaSource Extension was found and no HLS manifest was given or HLS is also not supported. Please download the Flash Player from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ or try another browser."

Firefox was lacking behind in supporting the HTML5 Media Source Extensions, it's in since Firefox 42. Everything beyond this still needs Flash for HLS or MPEG DASH playback

Here is tracking bug for Firefox Media Source Extensions API https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617

I did something similar to this a few months ago using nginx, rtmp, and vlc in hopes of making an HTML5 only streaming service.

In the end, I found out that using a VM for transcoding is not a great idea. Having a > 3 minute lag time between input and output was... difficult to work with.

I'm not willing to pay for Amazon's transcoding service because of uh, student wages, so I scrapped that project.

Fun weekend project at the very least.

I'd love to see someone play around with getting GLC + Twitch and/or Youtube Live working together. Or making streaming video in real time from a programming language (maybe openFrameworks can do this?) ...

Maybe the API clients are helpfull for this?https://developer.bitcodin.com/doc/api-clients

Yeah that's all about transcoding and making pipelines and such... I guess I'm talking about the actual creation of full motion video.

Would bitcodin be handling the takedown requests?

What do you mean in particular?

what's the deal with multicast?

We don't see multicast any more, in OTT streaming formats such as DASH or HLS use cheap and scalable HTTP infrastructure and HTTP caches, which can be seen as application layer multicast

Hey, I'm the founder of Streamup, a live entertainment platform w/ 22MM MAU. We're encountering a lot of similar challenges, so we're looking for bright engineers to collaborate with. Tweet me @kyledmichelson and let's talk.

Cool! Drop me a line at sl@bitmovin.com