21 Jun: My vision on the web video future

posted by: martijn, at 21 June 2008 14:29 GMT+1, 21 June 2008 15:36 GMT+1

The last year I focussed myself, together with Cross Media Ventures, a lot on web video with Flash. We tried to stream video with Red5 and FMS (2 and 3) and Wowza. Every server worked well until the connections reached a limit.

Product:	Max Connections	Price
FMS:	600	€ 1200
Red5:	800	Free
Wowza:	1000	€ 750
Windows:	1500	€ 500

Purely looking at Flash streaming Wowza was our winner, but in comparison with Windows Media Server it failed. Silverlight gaines a lot of popularity on this ground. Streaming video with Flash is fun but very limited and therefor losing to silverlight. Another problem is that alll servers can cluster but only Wowza and Windows server can also load balance.

So my conclusion is at the moment: Choose silverlight (and I'm not known for my affection with Microsoft ;)). If Adobe want to stay in the race it should look at their streaming server posibilities and licences.

Or choose Wowza if you want to use Flash.

2 Comments

Scott Roberts says:
at 24 June, 2008 19:07

These numbers look very bad for Adobe and worse for FMS customers.Can you give some more details about your testing?

Thanks in advance-sorberts
Martijn van Beek says:
at 25 June, 2008 19:42 martijnvanbeek.net

I ran the Red5 tests with Babbavideo.com, which has 1000 visitors at the same time watching video's (low bit rate flash video). Currently the website runs progressive downloads because Red5 runs out of memory. Wowza and FMS where tested by Cross Media Ventures. Wowza is also based on Java like Red5 and dies with the same problem Red5 does (out of memory).
FMS was the streaming force behind a Nickelodeon website about Anubis. They measured it with a bandwidth monitor (stuck at 70Mb/s) and the admin panel.

21 Jun: My vision on the web video future

2 Comments

Scott Roberts says:

Martijn van Beek says: