According to the Streaming Media Magazine’s Live Streaming Technology Trends survey from 2024, nearly 35% of participants use Multi-CDN approach for delivering their content. Another 36%, use single CDN approach, which makes it more than two-thirds of respondents use CDNs for end-users delivery. Adopting a multi-CDN strategy distributes traffic across multiple CDN providers, improving uptime, expanding geographic coverage, and offering business flexibility to negotiate terms and manage costs.
OTT and live streaming services can deploy a robust, scalable, and cost-effective multi-CDN architecture using Nimble Streamer as the origin server. It is as a lightweight, efficient origin server optimized for this multi-CDN approach. It offers just-in-time packaging for multiple protocols, robust stream protection features, and real-time monitoring and control mechanisms. Unlike heavier server solutions, Nimble Streamer operates with minimal system overhead while providing extensive streaming capabilities.
Why use Nimble Streamer as origin?
Nimble Streamer stands out for this purpose:
- Lightweight footprint: It has an extremely low CPU and RAM usage. This allows cost-effective deployment on cloud instances, bare metal, or even ARM-based devices.
- Comprehensive protocol support: Supports RTMP, SRT, NDI, Zixi and many other protocols for ingesting live streams. Outputs include HLS, MPEG-DASH for wide device compatibility and sourcing CDNs, along with a range of other protocols like WebRTC and SLDP for ultra-low-latency streaming.
- Extensive DRM support: Adding DRM protection brings your monetization and content protection to another level. Nimble Streamer supports all major DRM providers and services to encrypt and play HLS and MPEG-DASH on end-users’ devices.
- Automatic transcription and translation: Accessibility of content is an important aspect of any service provider. Nimble Streamer uses on-premise Whisper AI and service-based Speechmatics for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to generate subtitles in one or multiple languages. Visit our voice recognition digest page to learn more.
- Just-in-time transmuxing: For VOD streaming, it dynamically packages live streams into different formats without saving to disk. This reduces storage needs, accelerates setup, and improves resource utilization.
- Playout support: If you need to make your own content programming to combine live and VOD for further delivery, Nimble Streamer has the Playout feature set that allows doing that with flexible workflow capabilities.
Examples
A mid-sized OTT platform based in Europe streams live sports to viewers globally. Using Nimble Streamer as its origin, it transmuxes and transcodes incoming SRT feeds into HLS and DASH, then securely distributes streams to both European and North American CDNs.
A global news organization uses 3 CDN providers across Asia, Europe, and North America. All CDNs pull the same HLS manifest from Nimble Streamer origins positioned in key data centers worldwide. Nimble also transcribes it to get subtitles and translation for international audience. In addition, a DRM encryption is added at origin. This ensures optimized delivery for each region while maintaining unified security policies and accessibility.
Architecture overview
Core components
- Ingest layer. Consists of live streams pushed via SRT, RTMP, NDI or other protocols from encoders, broadcasters, or upstream systems.
- Origin layer with Nimble Streamer. Receives live inputs, transcodes and transmuxes content into HLS and MPEG-DASH output formats with DRM and subtitles suitable for CDNs and applies security rules.
- CDN layer. Comprises multiple CDN providers configured to pull streams from Nimble Streamer’s origin endpoints. Each CDN is set up with unique access points and routing rules.
Let’s see how it can be implemented.
Deployment steps
Step 1: Install Nimble Streamer
Deploy instances of Nimble Streamer on geographically distributed servers using cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) or private infrastructure.
- Nimble Streamer uses WMSPanel for setup so you need to create a free trial account there first.
- Follow the installation instructions to get your instance up and running.
- Install Nimble Live Transcoder if you need to create adaptive bitrate (ABR) ladders on your origin server(s) from the input streams. You will also need Transcoder in case you decide to use ASR and Playout.
Next, you’ll set up the ingest and output.
Step 2: Configure ingest and outputs
Set up inputs to receive live streams from source encoders such as OBS, vMix, or Larix Broadcaster. The instructions can be found on respective digest pages of RTMP, SRT, NDI, Zixi or other protocols. In addition to that, check Nimble Streamer playlist on our YouTube channel to see the setup in action. E.g. RTMP setup of all kinds, or SRT transmuxing setup.
Having the input configured with our guides, you’ll also be able to enable HLS and MPEG-DASH outputs as one of the steps. Test them before proceeding with the next steps.
If you’d like to have ABR streams as part of your output, read this guide article and watch this video tutorial to set that up with Nimble Live Transcoder.
If your CDNs support direct ingest (push) of streams, Nimble Streamer can do that as well. Follow the aforementioned RTMP setup article and related video as an example of such re-publishing.
As we’ve also mentioned, you can apply DRM encryption and ASR for subtitles generation if needed.
Step 3: Set access restrictions if needed
Since you deliver your streams to CDNs and use Nimble Streamer only for origins setup, you may want to restrict any unauthorized access to your streams directly from those origins. This way you can focus on your security and monetization on the “last mile”.
Nimble Streamer allows creating aliases for your streaming applications. This provides capabilities to define different levels of security for same streams and also to have flexible reporting for your end-users. So you need to create an alias for each CDN where you deliver your stream to. Follow streaming alias creation article to see how it’s done.
Now when you have an alias, set it up as HTTP origin. It means that you will inform Nimble that some specific outgoing streams applications and even entire server HTTP output will be handled without session information. Read this article for details. This way, CDNs won’t get sessions info when obtaining the stream and will handle and cache streams properly.
You may also secure this new HTTP origin application by defining IP ranges where it will be allowed or forbidden. E.g. your CDN will be able to obtain streams while other viewers will not. Check geolocation restriction capabilities of Nimble Streamer in Paywall feature set.
Step 4: Integrate with CDNs
Now having all your output streams ready, provide them to each CDN provider. You can refer to their documentation about the specifics.
Example walkthrough
Here’s an example of a live concert broadcast:
- Nimble Streamer instance is installed on live production set in New York venue. It receives NDI signal from venue encoder and transforms NDI into SRT output stream.
- Nimble Streamer origin node is set in Frankfurt. It receives SRT and processes the stream into an HLS output.
- Two CDN providers (Akamai and CloudFront) pull packaged HLS streams.
- A broadcaster puts a web player of choice to let the audience play the content.
The setup can be completed using the description in steps above.
As it was mentioned above, a large amount of companies use a multi-CDN strategy. Implementing it with Nimble Streamer as the origin server offers several critical advantages:
- Improved reliability and service uptime by reducing dependency on a single vendor.
- Optimized global content delivery with cost-effective, scalable infrastructure.
- Full control over streaming workflows, including packaging formats and security measures.
This approach enables broadcasters, OTT platforms, and media companies to maintain service quality while achieving operational and financial flexibility. Practical examples and real-world deployments confirm Nimble Streamer’s role as a leading solution for efficient multi-CDN streaming setups.