Sky-live.tv is a website that broadcasts real-time astronomical occurrences. It is the result of collaboration between Ciclope Group, at the Technical University of Madrid’s Montegancedo Astronomical Observatory, and Shelios, a nonprofit organization aimed at promoting and disseminating lectures, courses, exhibitions, and the results of scientific expeditions to the general public. The two organizations share a desire to make astronomy more accessible to universities, students, and anyone else who is interested. With Sky-live.tv, it’s possible for anyone — from students and researchers, to armchair astronomers — to experience astronomical expeditions on their screens. Expedition members analyze the data and contribute to live broadcasts, and then the media content and results are distributed free under a public-domain license.
While Sky-live.tv’s original solution served the purpose initially, their software and setup was cumbersome, and could not manage a peak of several thousand concurrent connections. Additionally, network throughput was a concern.
Sky-live.tv also implemented a system using a content delivery network (CDN) through a third-party provider, but that solution very quickly became too expensive for its wide-scale distribution.
Challenges
Finding a cost-effective way to broadcast live astronomical phenomena over the Internet to large and geographically dispersed audiences on any device.
Streaming live video from disparate, often remote sites around the globe.
Solutions
Sky-live.tv turned to Wowza Media Server® 2 software to make its streaming-video operation functional, scalable, simple, and cost-effective. In just a few steps, Sky-live.tv could adapt the size of its solution on the fly using Wowza Media Server on Amazon EC2 cloud to fit the size of the audience at any given time with high reliability.
Sky-live.tv also customized its solution with Wowza’s Push Publishing AddOn to enable easy delivery of its live stream to partners that maintain their own CDN solutions.
Finally, because Wowza Media Server 2 supports a wide range of input streams with different media codecs and formats, Sky-live.tv could use all of its various hardware and software encoders to send live streams from expedition sites to its media streaming infrastructure.
Benefits
Robust Wowza Media Server software enables smooth, reliable delivery to audiences on any screen.
Wowza Media Server on Amazon EC2 cloud provides flexible capacity for large-scale streaming.
Compatible with multiple platforms, and off-the-shelf hardware, and software to eliminate compatibility issues, expand reach, and simplify setup.
Customizable with a variety of free and premium (paid) Wowza AddOn packages.
Urko Serrano, Ciclope Group IT engineer , commented “the fact that Wowza Media Server is compatible with so many different media codecs and formats is quite useful in our research projects because we can test different software prototypes without worrying about compatibility issues.”
