Geo-location and IP-based restriction

Available for Nimble Streamer and Wowza Streaming Engine

Many streaming media businesses are targeted to some geographical or network location. This may be a local streaming provider which want to concentrate on the relevant audience.

What can we do?

WMSPanel can set up the following behavior for Nimble Streamer and Wowza Streaming Engine.

The following Nimble Streamer entities can be protected: entire server, application and stream.
The following Wowza entities can be protected: entire server, virtual host, application, application instance and stream.
All protocols supported by respective media servers are covered by this feature set.

To start setting up server, go to top menu and select "Control" -> "WMSAuth paywall setup".

WMSAuth is a feature set which handles hotlink protection and other features like geo-lock and pay-per-view.

Create WMSAuth group

In WMSAuth, every restriction may be applied to a group of servers. So the first thing to do is to create a group and assign one or more servers to it.
Click on Add WMSAuth group to specify its name and proceed to further setup.

Create WMSAuth rule

Within a group, there may be several rules, each working with its set of Nimble Streamer or Wowza entities. Just click on "Add rule" to enter rule creation page.
Check this screenshot to see how you can specify application or stream regular expression.

After you save the rule, it will be applied to the server within a few seconds.

Specify geo

Now you can scroll to allow/deny lists and just add designated countries in there by clicking on nice Add buttons.
Please notice that deny list have top priority over allow list of countries and ranges.

User-Agent and Referer groups can also be defined and used for Nimble Streamer viewers' restriction based on respective HTTP headers.

Specify IP range

You may set up specific IP ranges in allow/deny as well. To set this up, click on "Add or manage custom IP range" to open a page to create IP ranges. Each range may have its own set of CIDRs for range setup you need.

Each range can be used separately in either allow or deny list just like countries.

Is that it?

Yes. Now the agent will be checking each incoming request IP for being in deny list for geo-location and IP ranges. If the IP belongs to denied conditions, the connection will be denied, it takes just several milliseconds.

You may also combine this functionality with other paywall features like hotlink protection, connections, bandwidth limitation and can also be used as a foundation for pay-per-view feature set.

Questions or problems

Geo restriction does not work? Check the troubleshooting FAQ.

What if WMSPanel is not accessible? Geo restriction works regardless of WMSPanel availability. If your server can't connect to WMSPanel for some reason, the protection will still work perfectly. Once the rules are set up, the control panel is not used anymore.

This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind(c), available from http://www.maxmind.com