All Wowza Streaming Engine Reviews
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Wojciech
Verified reviewer
Online Media, 2-10 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
Nadaje Broadcasting recommends Wowza Streaming Engine
Nadaje Broadcasting use Wowza to stream in multiple use cases: RTMP to HLS/DASH; RTSP to HLS/DASH; Secure token streaming with CDN - protected internal corporate streaming; Transcoding to lower quality to cover all devices. All this makes Wowza very flexible software and Nadaje Broadcasting's main video streaming software partner.
PROSThe most impactful features are transcoding and HLS/DASH web streaming. The software was easy to integrate and operate via the API and integration is stable while upgrading. Our company use Wowza Streaming Engine for over 10 years!
CONSAdditional charges for support and a bit heavy memory usage in some use cases. Also logging was not possible per a vhost.
Dennis
Sports, 1 employee
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
3
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed April 2020
Wowza Streaming Engine is the heart of our business
Overall, our experience has been extremely good. We run two servers that are load balanced and the primary also is linked to a third party CDN. Without the CDN, we can comfortably stream HD to over 300 viewers and with the CDN enabled, there is no limit. The Wowza Streaming Engine is more tolerant of of venue origin streams than many other services and that is extremely important.
PROSWowza Streaming Engine dependably delivers our live sports webcasts. The compatibility with our JW Player is perfect and the live DVR allows fans and statisticians to go back and review plays. The system is well understood by most web developers, it is very full featured and the license fees are affordable when deployed on our own equipment.
CONSDeficiencies, in my opinion, are the complexities of storing separate files for each ABR resolution and automating a system to create SMIL files for on-demand playback. A single file with all resolutions would be very preferable. There is no function within Wowza to accept an uploaded file and translate it into usable frame aligned files for on-demand playback. We have to use an unauthorized file naming plug-in in order to automate our playlist and SMIL file creation.
Reason for choosing Wowza Streaming Engine
Wowza had implemented a good human interface for control and we had the benefit of a great guy that helped us get started. This sales engineer made all the difference.
Reasons for switching to Wowza Streaming Engine
Real Networks discontinued their server support.
Clinton
Education Management, 10,000+ employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
2
VALUE FOR MONEY
2
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
1
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed June 2022
Poor customer experience with support and billing
Our overall experience with Wowza Streaming Engine has been a mixed bag. It has required a lot of time and work to achieve the results that we were looking for. Upgrades and patching have been difficult and the documentation is at times out of date, incorrect, or difficult to follow. Support has been difficult to deal with especially since they will reference and send you links to the documentation to "help." It's been very difficult to work with Wowza and our experience overall has been poor. The software works well enough to get the job done but offers nothing exceptional in return.
PROSWowza has been an important part of our systems over the past 7 years or so. We have built several systems around streaming video on campus for different purposes. Wowza has been a mostly stable product that has allowed us to transmux, transcode, and distribute video across campus for a decent price.
CONSThe configuration and management of the servers is difficult. Upgrades in our environment are difficult because named user account configurations are difficult to deal with around the Wowza Streaming Engine product. You have not made it easy to upgrade software and full version upgrades from version 3 to version 4 was incredibly difficult. Webrtc implementation took some work to get working properly. Documentation is out of date at times and hard to follow. Customer support has been the worst experience we have had here and is causing us to rethink our use of Wowza. We keep on trying to change our billing but no one will work with us on it and we keep having billing issues every year. We never receive billing notices. We get late notices without ever receiving an initial billing notice or request. We request a PO but only get told to use a card. Our customer service representative never returns our calls and has not been helpful in this matter.
Sean
E-Learning, 11-50 employees
Used weekly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed August 2021
Wowza Streaming from a 2nd-generation admin
Having inherited the administrative duties and development/implementation of the Wowza Streaming Engine from my predecessor, it's been an interesting experience. The interface came across as a little daunting, with terminology I didn't recognize, at first, however; after quite a bit of homework, I feel quite comfortable with the system now. I went through the process of installing, configuring, and updating a secondary trial version on one of our internal testing servers to learn more about the system. Overall, the experience of working with the Wowza Streaming Engine has pleasant.
PROSMost of the features of the Wowza streaming engine are extremely easy to use; Streamlock, creating/updating VOD applications, and configuring server setting (e.g. media cache) to name a few. The analytics tools are also extremely useful for reading usage over time, as well as identifying moments in time when the server(s) started experiencing issues, making any necessary debugging less time-consuming.
CONSSometimes the bugs are extremely difficult to debug. We had a recurring issue where the server would suddenly become unresponsive. There was never really any clear indication why it was hanging, nor was there any sense of cause. It seemingly occurred at random points of the day without any clear cause. Restarting would quickly fix it, but it was still a frustrating system-interruption. Customer Service made this issue easier to manage.[SENSITIVE CONTENT] were all extremely helpful. After updating to a newer version the issue appears to have been alleviated (though it did still occur once last month).
Andrew
Education Management, 201-500 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed September 2023
Wowza Engine at GST
Easy to use right out of the box to do Live Streaming.It has its own API for us to use in our applications.
CONSThe (UPGRADE) process could be a little more smoother.
Reason for choosing Wowza Streaming Engine
Cost, ease of use and API to use.
Reasons for switching to Wowza Streaming Engine
Flash Player was going away and we needed something to handle more users as well.Also cost. Wowza was cheaper and had a good community established.
Anonymous
11-50 employees
Used weekly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed September 2023
The most flexible and economical streaming video platform
Simple to use, a large community available to find more specific solutions, good frequency of updates, excellent support.
CONSThe documentation is sometimes too vague, to solve a simple and specific problem you have to proceed with trial and error.
Paresh
Consumer Electronics, 51-200 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed September 2023
The most versatile and cost-effective streaming video platform.
Wowza Streaming engine is easy to use, develop customized solution which helps us to develop feature on top of streaming service, frequent updates for technology , and outstanding customer support available.
CONSThe resource demand for transcoding is substantial.
janet
Non-Profit Organization Management, 11-50 employees
Used daily for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
2
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed December 2019
Wowza
Again it was great for many reasons like the ease of live streaming and the initial setup.
PROSI really liked the ease of use and the easy setup. I found all of the video codecs really frustrating and Wowza cleared all that up. As well it made setting up a live stream through our ip camera very simple which was a relief.
CONSI really found the support documents confusind and hard to follow. When we did run into an issue with CORS headers there seemed to be no straight forward answer with out paid support.
Reasons for switching to Wowza Streaming Engine
Cost
Carlos
Verified reviewer
Government Administration, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used monthly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed December 2018
A good software for sending your video streamings to third-parts
I have solved the viewing of cameras which make the connection using 4G allowing to me to save and resend the video to another departments witouth lossing quality.
PROSThe software is very easy to use , you need the minimun time for making the installation and put the settings for testing it. You dont need to have specifical skills or an special enviroment.
CONSthe documentation is very hard to understand, specially if you need to make addons to the software like customizing the website or offering a good front-end to other customers. In additiont to that, I dont see a policy of profiles with restricitions for giving your streamings. You could have clients connections which need 100% of the videos using passwords and another free connections.
Anonymous
11-50 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
3
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed December 2018
Wowza live streaming review
We use it to stream in our game the stream is good just it lags a lot but overall good experiance
PROSStreams are available in many formats and globally available service .Service is good in Mumbai
CONSLaggy stream upto 15 seconds lag.And noise disturbance can be made little less.
Jennifer
Broadcast Media, 11-50 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed April 2020
Streaming software for just about anyone
We have found Wowza to be a great company to work with. Even though we use the tiniest fraction of the tools and services that Wowza offers, we get great customer service and attentive help whenever needed. We feel like we are important clients, even though we are nowhere near their largest client.
PROSAs a government TV station broadcasting council meetings and live press conferences to the public, the reliability of our 24/7 live stream is number one priority. But, our live stream is just a small fraction of the services we provide and we don't have time for a product that needs full time handholding. Wowza has been a consistently steady friend in this endeavor. Plus, we also love being able to route the stream to as many places as we need to.
CONSSetting up a new stream involves a lot of options and settings that, when we were brand new to the tool, were confusing and somewhat tedious. We had to document the settings we wanted and referred to that documentation for a long time before we had it down. A more streamlined set up, perhaps even with a 'copy from previous event' would go a long way in making the tool easier to use.
Reasons for switching to Wowza Streaming Engine
We were having a lot of problems with outages on livestream.com and needed something more reliable for our 24/7 live stream of the Seattle Channel's government TV broadcast.
Robert
Computer Software, 11-50 employees
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed December 2018
Using Wowza to stream to .NET console application over HTTPS
We have customers that are requesting a level of security that requires all documents and files, including videos, to be transported over HTTPS. We could copy and cache the videos on each user's machine, but it is far more efficient to be able to use a streaming video server to stream the videos over HTTPS and Wowza enables us to do this.
PROSIt was very easy to set up and use the streaming engine. It supports a wide variety of formats. It is capable of doing everything we need it to do and much, much more. The documentation was, for the most part, very clear and easy to follow, and the support staff that I contacted were very responsive and helpful.
CONSAs stated, the documentation was helpful, clear, and easy to follow, for the most part. I realize that our use case was an edge case as compared to the standard Wowza user, and that learning how to set up https/SSL/Streamlock, creating certificates, etc. does not actually have anything to do with Wowza software per se. However, their documentation in this regard was a big sparse and I had to supplement this with additional research. The stated requirement and references to OpenSSL was particularly confusing, because this piece of software was not required to do what I needed. I am unsure why half of the references say to use the Java keytool to create certificates, and other references state a requirement for OpenSSL to perform actions for which the keytool is definitely capable. Additionally, there was some confusion regarding the format of the URL to get the videos to successfully play over HTTPS. The format that the support team sent me did not work. However, by thoroughly reviewing the software in order to fully document my case for further support, I was able to come up with a format that did function. The fact that all these link formats should in fact point to the same place and perform the same function, but that only one actually worked, is probably my biggest, and really only, complaint with the software.
Brian
Government Administration, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
1
EASE OF USE
1
VALUE FOR MONEY
1
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
1
FUNCTIONALITY
1
Reviewed August 2021
Worst software ever
My experience has been horrible. I have not had a single positive interaction with the software or the support staff. I was hired at my current company and no one had administered this software that was left at the company. All but one of the active live streams all broke on the same day and I have been trying to get any of them to work again. I have submitted multiple tickets with Wowza and have been given no assistance. They send me pre bottled scripted answers to questions I did not ask then ask me for information about the topography of the internet. I will say that again, I am told by the support team that they can not assist me because I can not give detailed information on all hops and network between my wowza streaming server in our DMZ and the client computers failing to stream files from somewhere out on the internet. I have tried talking to them to get past this, but they just close the ticket on me. I have had one technician reply after the initial response email was sent out before they too closed the ticket. None of them giving me answers. I have followed the guides that they have on their website with multiple other engineers at my company and we have not been able to get a single stream to work. From what I have seen this is the worst software I have ever tried to use that was considered complete and on the market.
PROSI liked the IDEA of what this software could accomplish, but it barely functions at that.
CONSEverything from the interface and where things are to configure streaming to the capabilities of it streaming.
Gagan
Broadcast Media, 11-50 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
The WOW factor in Wowza Streaming Engine
Super smooth effortless and simple installaton, amazing flexibility with different OS, minimum computing requirements, Wide & vast Streaming input and output options , Scalability without disturbing existing workflow, seamless harmony for low to high load needs , indepth forums for help , intelligent engine that understand your needs at ease and delivers in abundance .
CONSMiss the turnkey options like raw wireframes for key verticals like VOD pages with options of brand logo etc , video mixing , native features like screen grabber & streamer , video or GIF overlays . Expected option of Whitelabel or Blacklist feature for IP on the fly, transcoder control via infographcis as a rolling window menu, a more iteractive menu window with complete controls on stream IO page or Test page itself could be a boon for users.
Brian
Internet, 2-10 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed April 2020
Powered by Wowza
We were able to customize the software using their catalog of RestAPI endpoints in conjunction with custom Wowza Modules to deliver a customized, end-to-end streaming solution used by countless organizations worldwide.
PROSWowza Media Server and eventually Wowza Streaming Engine were game changers for our organizations. Prior to finding Wowza, our live streaming solution was a compilation of several vendors. We were able to customize the software using their catalog of RestAPI endpoints in conjunction with custom Wowza Modules to deliver a customized, end-to-end streaming solution used by countless organizations worldwide.
CONSThe java-based software is a bit heavy on system resources as compared to non-java solutions, but it's certainly manageable.
Reason for choosing Wowza Streaming Engine
Consolidated feature set, ease of use, cost.
Reasons for switching to Wowza Streaming Engine
Consolidated feature set, ease of use, cost.
Tyler
Computer Software, 2-10 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
High in reliability and flexibility
We have Wowza running 24/7/365 within our streaming platform and it has remained rock solid throughout, with minimal issues or errors. Setup is straightforward and offers a high degree of flexibility - you can build almost anything streaming related on top of it. Outstanding feature set. We have also appreciated the continual improvements and updates made to the product over time.
CONSIt takes a substantial amount of technical expertise to get anything but the simplest streaming workflows up and running. This is not a problem for us, as our team has a high level of technical knowledge, but I imagine it could cause an issue for some organizations.
Rob
Information Technology and Services, 2-10 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
Wowza - our customers love it!
Wowza has been the number one streaming software pretty much since it was introduced to the market. We have OEM’ed Wowza into our product for many years now & its always stood up to any challenges we have thrown at it. I have personal connections to many of the Wowza team & they have done well to keep a personal touch even when scaling their business
CONSSome of Wowza’s features can be a little fiddly to set up & configure for non techs, however that creates opportunities for companies like ours who have created a UI that makes it easier to use
Reason for choosing Wowza Streaming Engine
Better feature set - better company to do business with
Reasons for switching to Wowza Streaming Engine
RealNetworks EOL’ed Helix
Richard
Verified reviewer
Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
2
EASE OF USE
2
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
1
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed August 2021
Support is really long and troublesome
I've used Wowza for ten years and tbh my recent experience of support is poor. Its always been slow and not great but recently we've been trying to implement a server for nearly 3 months with out of the box features not working properly. Support is slow, they don't respond fully, they will only deal with one issue at a time and they miss the point a lot. It's not a great experience and all Wowza say about it is spend £2k with us and we will do it for you - well that misses the point that the support is just not up to standard at the moment and hasn't been for quite some time now (months).
PROSSome features if you can get them working
CONSDifficult to setup, lots of things are very different in implementation than on help articles
Mike
Computer Software, 51-200 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
High Reliability & Scalability. Great Value.
It has been a very positive experience. Use the product every day and have not had any issues.
PROSThe Wowza Streaming Engine is supported by our commercial webcasting products because we have found it incredibly reliable, easy to deploy, and efficient in its ability to handle load. As we tested the server at scale, we were pleased to see how cost effectively we could scale, if necessary, to meet our customers' requirements.
CONSIt does everything we need it to at this point.
Reason for choosing Wowza Streaming Engine
Overall best value, great reliability, easy to deploy. Really enjoyed working with their team. Incredibly responsive and helpful during sales cycle and after.
Reasons for switching to Wowza Streaming Engine
Every couple of years, we look at how the streaming ecosystem is evolving and which products are responding best to that evolution and planning most effectively for future demand and use cases.
David
Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing, 11-50 employees
Used more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
Feature rich, reliable and well supported
We integrated our hardware encoders with the Wowza Streaming Engine to enable a simple workflow for customers to get live streaming quickly and easily. Wowza provides all of the features our customers require to securely distribute video both inside their company and out in a way that is friendly to the viewers and their IT network.
PROSVery feature rich and rock solid reliable performance. These guys know streaming better than anyone. It is a very popular product so knowledge and experience gained with it is very transferable. They also have a great team of folks to help you out if you need it.
CONSThere's really nothing not to like about it. It's relatively intuitive to use and does everything our customers need.
Reason for choosing Wowza Streaming Engine
Wowza was already well established as the leader in this space and upon meeting the folks we'd be working with to integrate our hardware encoders into the workflow we had no doubts this was the best solution for our customers.
Sujoy
Education Management, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
2
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed December 2018
Newtek MS1 Wowza Streaming Engines
Good boxes when the work. If you can fix the random stopping. It would be a perfect box for a 24/7 operation. If not, I could not recommend it to anyone who needs a reliable streaming system.
PROSEasy to use, very nice quality and easy to maintain
CONSStreaming stops randomly. Unknown reason. Sometimes it runs for weeks, then stops randomly. Newtek gave me software updates, beta software etc.. none have given me a 99.99% up time. I have remote in on weekends and holidays, and after hours just to check if the streaming is running. I think the reason it keeps on stopping maybe due to the constant nagging of the Microsoft Update popup. Don't know. Or it loses it's license information randomly. Who knows. But THIS HAS TO BE FIXED.
Brandt
Financial Services, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
Exceptional Support and community
We found wowza to be easy to use, and implement with a versatile solutions across the board. Support is available at all levels of care and they have an exceptional engineering team to pull from. Well documented and enthusiastic community - 10/10
CONSthere were some unforeseen issues between updates but this was mostly due to not following release details.
Roman
Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
Great and powerful streaming server
The WSE is truly amazing, easy to set up and works with. The support that the company provides is fast, polite and always on point
PROSEasy to set up, powerful, great support.
CONSIt is sometimes hard to release new modules for different versions because of different Java version support, but not a deal-breaker.
Frank
Media Production, 11-50 employees
Used more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
1
EASE OF USE
1
VALUE FOR MONEY
1
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
1
FUNCTIONALITY
1
Reviewed May 2021
Horrible support packages, no integrity!
Customer service is limited and not a priority. Company integrity is questionable as refunds are not offered post subscription renewal date, even though no service has been rendered. Lots of available options with better customer service and higher standards available.
PROSWorked with limited functionality. Lots of options that are better.
CONSSupport takes days unless you pay extra.Back and forth with support very slow, not built for a production environment. Failed to cancel on the day of renewal and was not offered a refund (though we are not using the software) Customer service is not a priority.
Reasons for switching to Wowza Streaming Engine
Lacking customer service.
Anonymous
51-200 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed December 2018
A versatile and flexible streaming solution
High number of ingress protocol compatiblity, modularity.
CONSTranscoding quality cannot be compared to libx264, required too high datarates compared to quality. Transcoding resource requirement is high.