It handles transcoding in a simple way, and allows us to also syndicate live streaming as needed.

We have been using Wowza Streaming Engine at our company for 11 years now. With the myriad of things that can go wrong with live streaming - I can't think of a single instance where the issue was trace routed back to Wowza Streaming Engine. Amongst the myriad of variables - from live stream operator knowledge, internet hiccups and outages, gear malfunctions, CDN node outages and the variables that want to play interference with a successful live stream - I can whole heartedly say Wowza is bottom of the barrel in the "blame game". Admittedly we are ona fairly old version of Wowza Streaming Engine as we believe in "if it's not broke don't fix it" and it's been overwhelming solid. We use the software hosted on Azure VM's.

Intuitive user interface and consistent up time.