MojoHost educational hosting thread - Save money hosting flash videos
 

Hi Everyone,

I came across a great perfect example of a client with a tube site whom we were able to help deliver overall better quality and save them money at the same time. For all practical purposes, this same methodology could be used for flash trailers on your tours or those on free hosted galleries.

My recommendation for this particular client was to have them license Wowza Flash Media Server Pro. This is sold regularly on their site http://www.wowzamedia.com for $995 per server. MojoHost has a licensing agreement for this software and offers it to clients for +$50/monthly. What can it do for your business? See below...

Example Client Chart (24 hour view)

http://www.mojohost.com/gfy/wowza_savings.gif

The spot where the bandwidth drops immediately is where the Wowza server became active. For this client the addition of Wowza that we recommended comes at a cost of +$50/month and generates a savings of over 40% on his bandwidth usage. Further savings were generated at a later date by encouraging the client to turn off the "auto-play" on his flash videos. The same client chose to continue allowing people to embed his videos in their pages, disabling this would certainly decrease usage some.

Simply put, it can save you money immediately and also improve your surfers experience. There is no need to add additional servers, Wowza can be installed to run right on your web server. Rather than using a default configuration which would have surfers downloading the whole file Wowza allows the surfer to intelligently view the stream. They can jump around the video and are ultimately only downloading what they are viewing. Herein lies a tremendous savings! The fact is that surfers often watch the very start then jump to the middle and then end of movie clips. With Wowza, you're only paying for what they watch rather than a normal setup where they are having to download and buffer the whole file to jump around and watch different parts.

Additionally, Wowza offers some new security features which can be used to lock down your content further. So, if you don't want to let people embed your flash video in their pages there was not previously a simple and effective way to prevent that. This does!

Wowza can also be used as a platform for live streaming very successfully, saving tens of thousands over the options from Adobe.

Wowza can also stream the new high definition format H.264 and also some other formats of media:

SHOUTcast
Icecast
Apple QuickTime Broadcaster
Vara Software Wirecast
HaiVision
Orban

If you would like to discuss this further please feel free to call, e-mail or ICQ.

Thank you kindly,

Brad

interesting

I <3 MojoHost!

Brad,

This really will do wonders for tons of high traffic sites. Greg is helping us to get this going on our severs. A big huge thumbs up :)

Amar

Looks good.. i'll hit u up soon!

Very interesting!

Good stuff Brad

Can't wait to see it in action for your high traffic galleries and tours... Get some!

:)

Brad

wow 54.9 Mbps out... nice...

Good Stuff Brad :thumbsup

Youre always trying to help!



ok here comes the reach around promotions :winkwink:

I do business with Brad and I've never had to wait for more than 10 minutes for results from Brad and his Staff at MojoHosting. Im not going to stake the claim thats its ALWAYS like that... but come on... whos gets that anywhere anytime?

Mojo is top notch! <----- (I mean it)

Awesome solution for anyone serious about Flash.

I'll apply the reach around discount to your next invoice! :1orglaugh :winkwink:

Thank you for your business, it's the droves of loyal customers that have helped us continue growing exponentially and staff up to be the best fully managed hosting company out there.

Cheers,

Brad

I'll bookmark this thread it might be more than useful for the future projects.

Thanks!

That's very interesting

Great info, Brad. Thanks for sharing.

Can you allow certain domains to embed the videos and block all others?
Like having one server with all videos and embeding those on all other sites on different servers?

Holy shit, finally something useful to put in Board Briefs on ii. Thanks!

very interesting indeed, wow

Glad I could give you something helpful! :)

Brad

Has H.264 streaming changed for Wowza since January 08?

Hello Socks,

Glad to hear you are moving along.

At the moment we do not support H.264/AAC streaming. Adobe does not support H.264/AAC streaming into Flash yet either (progressively download only a the moment). We will support it with a FREE upgrade as soon as we can, which is currently expected to be shortly after Adobe releases FMS3 (which will include H.264/AAC streaming).

--Dave S

Also another way to save bandwidth is to not let their player buffer too far past where they currently are in the video.. it will essentially slow down the stream to them because they have enough buffer to keep playing. Does Wowza help with this too, or is that different technology?

Yes it has, I don't recall exactly when but it was in the last few months. I will inquire with the guys on Monday about the buffering question. :thumbsup

Brad

I know what Brad's trying to do here, he's just making these posts so I'll spend more with him. I'm onto him!

Sending you an email :)

veery interesting

Sorry I was getting caught up on GFY yesterday too quickly and I missed your question. The answer is yes, you can allow either all urls to embed or you can selectively choose them. There is a nice list of security features built in, the best out there for protecting flash I think.

Brad

Another reason why I think you guys are the best :)

My feelings as well. Brad you are the man. :thumbsup Had a GREAT time in SF... Let's play golf again soon. Thanks, J