Adopting Softvelum products step-by-step

"What is the cost? What hardware should we use? How should we build our network?"

A common question of our trial users sound similar to this one:
"I'd like to build a large scale streaming infrastructure. It will provide N channels for M simultaneous users. What is the cost of such solution? What would be servers' configuration?"

Such questions cannot be answered in one sentence because a lot of aspects need to be addressed. Some of them are:

What is your servers' throughput?
Do you need to change the content, i.e. transcode or alter in any way?
How will the audience be distributed geographically?

You probably don't have answers at the beginning of your project. So we recommend growing your network step by step. This will allow trying our technologies and increasing your costs gradually.
Here we show an example of this kind of approach but you can follow your own path.

Start your trial

This stage will have zero cost and will clarify a lot of your concerns.

When you sign up for WMSPanel account, you get a free 2-weeks trial period. It provides most of Nimble Streamer core features and all stats metrics of WMSPanel.
After that you can install Nimble Streamer on your favorite OS on either hardware or some virtual hosting like AWS or Azure. The installed instance is then registered in your WMSPanel account where you can start setting it up for streaming.
Live streaming setup depends on the protocols which you have as input and output. Our live streaming reference page has links to respective sections of our documentation.
Check this RTMP setup example for taking published stream and make HLS output.
DVR setup for Nimble Streamer is also available as part of WMSPanel trial. So you can try recording and playing your live streams.
Paywall features are also working fine during the trial. Hotlink protection is easy to integrate, so you should try that at no cost.
You can also try advanced stats during your free trial like geo-location, ISP, unique viewers and in-depth per-stream stats. They will give a good picture of your audience.

Your total cost at this point is 0 USD as it's just a trial period. If you want to take a break and return later then you can just abandon your account and it will be automatically removed a few days after the trial period is over.

Give more load

Having 2 weeks of trial, you can test your Nimble Streamer instance with more load. Nimble has high performance so you can check what amount of viewers your hardware or virtual server is able to handle. You can try performance tuning guide to set up your server for handling thousands of viewers.

At this point you will be more or less familiar with Nimble Streamer capabilities. You will also have some confidence in further integration and extensive testing.

If you'd like to keep extending the usage of our technologies, you'll need to make subscription for WMSPanel service.

70 USD per month - this will be your price for 1 Nimble Streamer and basic WMSPanel account with default Full data slice.
It can be more if you've added extra stats metrics or tried to add more servers.
You will be charged monthly and if you add or remove servers or options, your price will be updated accordingly before the end of each billing period.

Try transcoding

Your streaming scenarios may require Live Transcoder for changing the content, like making multiple resolutions, adding picture overlays or changing audio channels.

Having premium WMSPanel account, you can subscribe for Nimble Live Transcoder license.
You can try your license on some beginner-grade server, either hardware or virtual one, with software decoding and encoding with no need for special equipment. This will allow testing simple ABR scenario with a couple of renditions and an audio passthrough.
Transcoder drag-n-drop web UI is very easy to use, check our YouTube playlist to see examples of its usage.
Once you become familiar with transcoding setup, you can try running it at a larger scale, e.g. adding more scenarios and trying hardware acceleration.
Both Intel QuickSyck and NVidia NVENC hardware acceleration methods are supported.
Any active Live Transcoder license can be registered multiple times so if you want to try some different hardware, you can install new Transcoder instance and register existing license there. Your existing transcoding scenarios can easily be cloned to a new server.
Each Transcoder license price is 50 USD per month.
You can cancel Transcoder license any time if you don't want to proceed with using it, you can create a new one any time later.

120 USD per month - this is your total cost for WMSPanel basic account with 1 Nimble Streamer instance and 1 Transcoder license at this point.

Add edges

As long as your audience grows and your traffic increases, you will face the need for improving your delivery network.

Nimble Streamer can be used as both origin and edge server as shown in this power origin snapshot where an origin server performs transcoding while edges only deliver the content to end users.
You can also create power edges which will have Live Transcoder installed. This will allow sending single bitrate streams to edges and do all the heavy duty there to reduce the bandwidth usage between origin and edges.
Take a look at Reliable Low Latency Delivery with SRT+SLDP post in Haivision blog describing a combination of Haivision encoder with Nimble Streamer as origin and edge.
Once you have multiple edges, you may want to implement load balancing based on Nimble API.
At this stage you will definitely like our reporting features to have viewing metrics of your audience.

The cost will only depend on your approach (power origin vs. power edges vs. the combination of those), with 2 variables - number of edges origins/servers and number of Live Transcoder licenses. If you use extra reporting, it will also add up to your costs.

Further growth

Using step-by-step approach you will keep raising a scalable delivery network with full control of CAPEX and OPEX. It will be optimized for your streaming scenarios and use cases.
And our team will make sure you have our best support to help you achieve that.