How to Set Up a Streaming Server, from A to Z
The new Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a web installer that is available at www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx to prompt you to download various components. Web PI automatically senses dependencies (additional applications, DLLs, or the like) that need to be installed along with the chosen application. When I chose to install IIS Media Services 4.0 beta, for instance, it loaded up the dependencies.
Should a previous version of a dependency already exist on the target machine, the dependencies will not be downloaded, but if an incompatible or out-of-date version exists, the Web PI will prompt you to download the more recent/compatible version. Web PI will also download hotfixes, or patches, for particular options, as it did when I chose to download the Application Request Routing (ARR) portion of IIS 7 as a test.
Microsoft makes it easy to put IIS MS 4 on an actual server, which I recommend if you’re doing live field encoding. For my review tests, we used a hefty laptop, a Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on an Alienware with an Intel Core i7 x940 (2.13 GHz) with 8GB of RAM, but the combination of Live Smooth Streaming and an on-board publishing point on the same machine was highly taxing to the laptop.
If you opt to use a server, consider Windows Server 2008 R2, which is available in three payment options: $469 to purchase outright or $10 per month for service providers. If your business uses WebsiteSpark, a program offered by Microsoft for small businesses, a free version that is good for 3 years is available.
If you don’t want to spring for Windows Server 2008 R2, IIS MS 4 also runs on Windows Vista with SP1 and Windows 7. After IIS 7 and IIS MS 4 are downloaded and installed, go back to EE4 Pro and choose the publishing point. Then start your encode and watch the video on your favorite Silverlight, iOS, or set-top box device.
Wowza
The name Wowza is no misnomer; I uttered the phrase immediately upon completing setup of Wowza Media Server 2. When I started the review process a few months ago, I set aside several hours to configure the server for basic VOD. Yet, once I downloaded, installed, and added a license key to the software, I was able to get the entire VOD setup running for multiple, simultaneous devices in less than 1 hour.
From the Quick Start Guide, I was able to follow the simple instructions to set up the server for VOD playback within 25 minutes, after which time I loaded both Wowza’s included VOD content—an MP4 file and an M4V file—and a few of my own MP4 files. I then followed the steps to start a stream.
The end result of this simple setup was the ability to watch the same MP4 file on the iPhone 3GS, a laptop with Flash Player 10.1 browser playback, and a QuickTime Player viewing of the same content in an RTSP stream. Wowza!
On some other multiprotocol servers, all the manifests and playlists need to be created ahead of time so that the server can simply serve up each set of files and manifests to the appropriate device. Wowza, on the other hand, uses standard MP4 or M4V files and then creates the manifest or playlist during the stream serving process. I did run into a few issues with setting up Smooth Streaming, but those issues have been addressed in a recent update to the server software.
Live streaming was almost as easy and took about an hour to put the elements in place. Still, for a $995 piece of software, the server software performs the functions of several other media servers combined.
In conclusion, we’ve barely scratched the surface on many variables you might encounter in setting up a media server or segmentation tool. For several of the systems, though, it’s honestly not that hard to do, as I found out when setting up the Microsoft and Wowza versions for reviews late last year.
But Wait, There’s More …
It should also be noted that, beyond the four platforms noted above, there are several other solutions that also handle multiple ABR protocols. One of these is Juniper Networks, Inc.’s Media Flow technology: Any ABR-encoded content loaded into Media Flow can be delivered to its corresponding video player, be it Apple HTTP Live Streaming, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Move Networks, Inc.’s adaptive streaming, or two flavors of Adobe Dynamic Streaming—RTMP and HTTP. Media Flow Controller also has a nice process in which it relies on a server-side player (a server plug-in) that establishes each and every incoming request (or session) in a separate virtual player.
One thing’s for certain: With this many companies engaged in the creation, segmentation, and delivery of ABR content, 2011 will be a year in which innovation continues to drive ABR adoption.
This article originally ran in the 2011 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook as "Fit to Serve."
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