While I thought that streaming live to mobile platforms was pretty well understood, we continue to receive questions from potential customers about how to do this so I thought I would try to explain the basics here to at least send the reader in the right direction.

Assuming that you want to publish a live stream to PC/Mac/Linux (Flash), iPhone/iPad (HTTP Streaming), and possibly Blackberry/Symbian/Android/WinMo (RTSP), you can do this today with a single Kulabyte XStream Live 2 encoder using one of two methods.

If you are only looking for Flash and HTTP streaming, the XStream Live 2 encoder delivers an RTMP stream to your Flash server of choice – FMS or Wowza – hosted on your own server, a cloud server, or your favorite CDN.  XStream Live 2 also delivers an HTTP stream to standard Apache servers hosted locally, on a cloud server, or at a CDN like Akamai. The XStream Live 2 encoder supports up to four different bitrate/resolution profiles and each of these can deliver to both a primary and secondary entrypoint giving you plenty of flexibility for delivering the streams you want to the Flash server and the Apache server and multiple streams can be delivered to the same server for Dynamic (Flash) or Adaptive (HTTP) streaming to the client.  A picture is worth a 1000 words, so check out the diagram below (click on it for a larger version).

While XStream Live 2's native HTTP streaming is great to have if you want to stream only to iPhone/iPad, it does leave out a majority of the mobile phone market. In the table below, you will see that Symbian and RIM still have higher market share than iPhone as of Q1 2010.

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

To not ignore this potential market of Blackberry, Symbian, Android, and WinMo mobile handsets, we use Wowza Media Server 2 every day with our live encoding demo and highly recommend it.  Wowza accepts an RTMP stream from our XStream Live 2 encoder and can then deliver Flash streams, HTTP streams, and also RTSP streams for the non-Apple mobile platforms.  Wowza does not re-encode, it is only repackaging and possibly segmenting the stream so there is no quality loss from the original encoded video.  You can install the Wowza software on your own server or get a preconfigured Wowza AMI on Amazon EC2 or use a CDN like Mirror Image who has Wowza origin and edge servers deployed in North America, Europe, and Asia.  Again, a picture is worth a 1000 words.

Another very nice feature of Wowza is that it can also be used to stream your VOD files.  For instance, when you encode with XStream Live 2 you will have .mp4 archive files written your local disk.  After the live session, simply copy those files up to your streaming server and Wowza will stream to all of the clients mentioned above from those .mp4 files; of course you still have to build the web front-end for this.   In the case of your own local server, you'll store the files there.  In the case of Amazon EC2, you can store the files on Amazon S3.  In the case of Mirror Image, they have their own VOD storage.

Hopefully the information above makes streaming to mobile platforms a little more clear and hopefully you also get the point that you can stream to all platforms with a single encoder and finally, if that encoder is XStream Live 2, you will get the best quality per bitrate live video encoding and streaming of any encoder on the market.