ECDN or Enterprise Content Delivery Network is an organisation's globally distributed network of servers deployed for the purpose of faster content delivery by replicating the digital content strategically across all the servers in the ECDN. The digital content is then made available in many places and when a user accesses it, the content from the nearest server is delivered and served to the user.
Without the ECDN, there are high chances of encountering the problems of network congestion and delayed delivery due to sudden and numerous requests from the users when they all try to access content at the same time.
VIDIZMO uses the ECDN to distribute live as well as on-demand video content. VIDIZMO allows organizations configure their own Origin and Edge servers for uninterrupted and fast live or on-demand streaming experience.
Streaming Server Options
By default, VIDIZMO provides four possible ECDN configurations to its customers:
- General Streaming Server Provider
- Wowza Streaming Server Provider (On-premise)
- Wowza Cloud Streaming Server Provider
- VIDIZMO Streaming Server Provider
This article discusses ECDN Node configuration of On-premise Wowza Streaming Server type. Users opting to utilize their on-premise Wowza CDNs as streaming endpoints can configure this option.
Before you Start
- ECDNs can only be configured at the Account-level (main Portal), and are inherited from this main Portal to all the sub-portals where these servers can be utilized but cannot be added, updated or deleted.
- Only users with Administrator or Manager roles can view, edit, delete and add ECDN Nodes in Streaming Server configuration.
- Make sure to provide a valid Network Share path for Recording path while configuring Wowza Streaming Server ECDN Node. This path shall be used for storing recorded live sessions.
Steps
Only Administrators and Managers of the main Account can configure ECDN nodes by following the steps:
1. From the Portal's Homepage
i. Click on the navigation menu on the top left of your screen
ii. Expand Admin tab
iii Click on Control Panel
2. From the Manage Portal navigation pane in Control Panel:
ii. Select ECDN Nodes
iii. Select Add Server to add a new ECDN node
3. On the Add ECDN screen:
i. Select Wowza as your Streaming Server Provider
ii. Provide a Title for the Streaming Server
iii. Specify the Node Type that you wish to configure:
- Creating a node of type Origin in case of serving on-demand content will essentially create it as an edge node because the uploaded content resides at the storage provider from where it is originally served. While in case of live streaming, you actually create an origin server since the encoder pushes the stream directly to this server
- Select Edge to configure a server that locally caches content form Origin Server and serves them to the end-users
iv. If you selected Node Type as Edge in the previous step, you will have to define its Origin server here from a list of available Origin servers, otherwise the field will be locked by default
v. You can Enable/Disable the use of this server by the toggle button
vi. Select the physical Location where you want the server to be based
vii. Select the Publishing Point Mode that needs to be configured for this streaming server. Choose from the following two options in drop-down:
- Push: In case of push, it expects video stream to be provided to it and will primarily reroute it to other servers in the CDN
- Pull: If the stream is pulled, it will fetch video stream from a remote server
viii. Specify the Base Playback URL which refers to the URL from where it will be played back. In case of Wowza, mention URL of your Wowza Streaming Engine server along with its listening port. To learn more about ports used by Wowza for streaming, see: Wowza Streaming Ports.
ix. Provide the REST API URL, which is Wowza's REST API URL required to make API calls to your Wowza Streaming Engine. The format for the REST API URL is
http://[yourWowzaServerBaseURL]:8087/v2/servers/[serverName]/vhosts/[vhostName]
x. Enter the Username of your Wowza account
xi. Enter the Password against the username of your Wowza account
xii. Enter the shared path of your content storage where you wish to save the recording of your live stream content as Recording Path. If you enable recording against Wowza streaming server's publishing point, this path shall be used to save your recorded content for on-demand playback.
xiii. Specify the Server Type based on the type of content that will be served through this server. The options available are:
- On Demand: For on-demand streaming of content
- Live: For live streaming of content
- Live and On Demand: For both live or on-demand streaming
xiv. Click on Save to save your ECDN node
A notification will appear stating Streaming Server Added Successfully.
To know more about configuring a live stream in VIDIZMO using this streaming server node, read:
How to Set Up Publishing Point for Live Streaming using Wowza On Premise Streaming Server