Wowza Streaming Reviews & Product Details

It’s a very reliable platform for both live streaming and VoD, offering a lot of flexibility for encoding, transcoding, and distributing videos. It supports a wide range of protocols—like HLS, RTMP, and WebRTC—along with its cloud integrations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Wowza offers a lot of features, but this can make the setup process complex for new users who are not familiar with streaming technology. In our case - beginners felt that there is a steep learning curve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

"Wowza's robust support for GPU encoding is a significant advantage, as it dramatically enhances performance and efficiency, especially with high-volume media loads."

"The Video-on-Demand (VOD) functionalities operate seamlessly and stably within our environment. In particular, Wowza's compatibility and efficiency in managing Opencast videos are excellent, which is crucial for our library of approximately 60,000 videos."

"The scalability of the system has been impressive; it effortlessly handles both live streaming and VOD content, which is critical for our operations."

"Reliability and stability have been top-notch; Wowza has performed without interruption or error even under demanding usage."

"Its versatile protocol support ensures that we can deliver content to a wide audience across various devices and platforms."

"The ability to customize and integrate Wowza with our existing systems has been flexible and helped us optimize our workflows." Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

"One significant drawback has been the complexity and difficulty of the Wowza Streaming Engine software update process. Updates often require considerable time and manual effort, which poses challenges for maintenance."

"The software's default operation as the 'root' user is a major security risk and causes concern within our environment. This necessitates additional steps to ensure security."

"The overall security posture could be improved and requires continuous monitoring and extra configuration to minimize risks. For example, default settings are not always optimal from a security standpoint."

"While the documentation is comprehensive, finding specific solutions or uncommon configurations can sometimes be challenging and time-consuming."

"The product's licensing and pricing model can occasionally be difficult to understand and optimize, particularly as needs evolve." Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of Wowza's aspects that I find crucial are flexibility, extensibility and reliability. I've been using Wowza for over a decade on many different projects, across many industries. I was always able to adjust it to suite my needs through either the wide choice of preexisting functionalities, or through writing custom modules. Whenever I faced a problem, I was able to resolve it either through the community forums or with the help of support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Wowza is very powerful and extensible, but that comes at the price of the server running "a bit heavy". But honestly, I rarely found this to be a big problem. If you want something super-optimized, without support for many features you possibly don't need, then something else might be a better choice.

The same is true for cost - if you are looking to save money, you could go for something free or cheaper, that will be less powerful or will require more work. But given what it offers - Wowza is a pretty good deal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about Wowza is its incredible robustness. We have been using it for many years, and it has consistently delivered high performance without issues. It is a highly reliable solution that has proven its value over time, regardless of how the streaming industry has evolved. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There isn't much to dislike. The only minor point is the learning curve, as it is a highly technical platform. However, once you have it configured, it works flawlessly, so we haven't encountered any significant issues in all our years of operation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love the ability to have publishing points in different data centers for redundancy. It gives us peace of mind that if one data center is having technical issues, we can quickly switch to a different one. I also enjoy creating cloud recordings of all live streams, as it provides a backup to local recordings. Wowza Streaming gives us a reliable CDN to reach an unlimited global audience, and it provides a great service for the price. The initial setup had no issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only negative is having to start the live instance every time. Sometimes it takes a few attempts. Eliminating the need to manually start the instance and have the live encoder do it would be better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Wowza Streaming can handle multiple streams at once with transcoded versions, ensuring nobody misses a broadcast even if their data or internet is poor. I also appreciate the easy integration of multiple streams to the same server, which allows our producer to take over a stream if a client fails to connect without disruption. The initial setup was extremely easy, taking just minutes given our internal product setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main portion that doesn’t work well is the HLS. Our team hasn’t ever been able to figure out how to enable low latency HLS even with LLHLS being enabled. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I appreciate that Wowza Streaming allows us the stability required for streaming, giving us the confidence that our stream reaches the right destination with great quality and all necessary settings. It just takes a lot of the worry out of our hands. The first setup of Wowza Streaming was really easy, which is something I value. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The user interface is a little bit clunky and needs someone who really knows what they're doing to use it. I would love something a little bit more cleaner and user-friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like Wowza Streaming's flexibility due to its ability to extend features using Java add-ons, which allows us to tailor it to our specific needs. We can add features to enable additional data gathering and integrate with our other applications. The initial setup of Wowza Streaming was very easy for us because we utilize the Docker containers and the available readme's. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Low latency HLS has issues starting in a timely repeatable fashion. The licensing has had issues in the past recognizing the USB key or phoning home. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like Wowza Streaming's Multi Bitrate auto Bandwidth and the ability to convert codecs and create multiple resolutions. Setting up a live stream from OBS to the web was easy, and while making something broadcast-ready was more complex, it was still okay. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

{"HLS Playback in Android makes still problems. Solution Stream about HTTPS, but sorry Android users are 60% of the world, nice that it works for Apple but just for Apple that are less people.","RTSP RTMO Streams are not good supported on, for example, Pixel 7 Phones.","MP3 is not playing over RTSP.","If we want to configure to open direct a RTSP Stream it was not working at all.","A price that is a little bit too high for me private."} Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I appreciate the documentation provided by Wowza Streaming as it's quite helpful. I find it valuable that we use RTSP, RTMP, and HLS streaming, which are the features I use the most for streaming video. While I wasn't involved in the initial setup, from what I've heard, it seems like it was a smooth process. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The support could be improved. Sometimes when the developers can't replicate an issue, they close the ticket, which can be frustrating. They should work to understand our environment better to help solve the problems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.