IBM FAQs

Recommended Encoding Settings

Cloud Transcoding Mode Settings

For most applications IBM Watson Media recommends sending a single high definition stream at 720p resolution with the following settings:

Quality

Resolution

Video Bitrate

Audio Bitrate

Audio Sample Rate

Frames Per Second

Video Codec

h.264 Profile

Keyframe interval

Audio Codec

Audio Channels

HD 720

1280x720

1,200 - 4,000 kbps

128kbps

44.1 kHz or 48 kHz

25 or 30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

Full HD 1080P and 4K streams require significantly more encoding processing power and bandwidth. These resolutions should only be used when you are certain you have sufficient resources to successfully encode and send with no quality loss. Attempting higher resolutions and bitrates without sufficient encoding resources or bandwidth can lead to poor image quality and interrupted or corrupted viewing or recordings.

Quality

Resolution

Video Bitrate

Audio Bitrate

Audio Sample Rate

Frames Per Second

Video Codec

h.264 Profile

Keyframe interval

Audio Codec

Audio Channels

HD 720

1280x720

1,200 - 4,000 kbps

128kbps

48kHz

25/30/60

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

HD 1080

1920x1080

4,000-8,000 kbps

192kbps

48kHz

25/30/60

h.264

Main or High

1 Second

AAC-LC

Stereo

4K

3840x2160

8,000-14,000 kbps

192kbps

48kHz

25/30

h.264

High

1 Second

AAC-LC

Stereo

Local Transcoding Mode Settings

Depending on your video production workflow, your encoding equipment, or your available bandwidth, you may want to send lower or higher resolutions and bitrates or you may want to send up to 4 multiple bitrates instead of using IBM Watson Media's Cloud Transcoding option. The table below provides recommended configurations for higher and lower bitrates and resolutions.

Quality

Resolution

Video Bitrate

Audio Bitrate

Audio Sample Rate

Frames Per Second

Video Codec

h.264 Profile

Keyframe interval

Audio Codec

Audio Channels

Low

480x270

400kbps

64kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Baseline

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono

Med

640x360

800 - 1200 kbps

96kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

High

960x540 / 854x480

1200 - 1500 kbps

96kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

HD 720

1280x720

1,500 - 4,000 kbps

128kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

HD 1080

1920x1080

4,000-8,000 kbps

192kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Main or High

1 Second

AAC-LC

Stereo

4K

3840x2160

8,000-14,000 kbps

192kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

High

1 Second

AAC-LC

Stereo

Video Resolution

We recommend streaming at a resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio as listed above

It is best to either match your original video source, or scale it down. For example, capture at HD 720 and stream at HD 720. Or capture at HD 720 and stream at 540 (high).

You should never be scaling up and streaming at a higher resolution than your original video source. For example, it does not make sense to capture at 720 and stream at 1080. You will have no gain in quality and you are using more bandwidth than is necessary for you and your viewers.

Be aware that higher resolutions require greater processing power to encode the stream. Attempting too high of a resolution on too little processing power can result in degraded image quality and corrupted or interrupted streams or recordings.

Video Bitrate

Many popular encoders on the market use variable bitrate encoding. With a variable bitrate encoder, when you set a bitrate, you are only setting a target. Depending on the level of motion in your video content and your keyframe interval, the actual encoded bitrate of the stream will go higher and lower than the target. This is one of the reasons why having adequate headroom in your bandwidth is so important.

Higher motion content requires a higher bitrate to achieve the same perceived quality video stream. For example, "talking heads" sitting at a desk with a relatively static shot can use the lower end of the bitrate recommendations provided above, whereas a sporting event or concert with high motion and many moving cameras will typically require a significantly higher bitrate at the same resolution to have the same perceived quality.

Higher resolutions require a higher bitrate to achieve the same perceived quality video stream. It is important that you use the guidelines provided in the chart above to appropriately match your bitrate to the resolution you are using. Using too high or low of a bitrate can lead to poor image quality or buffering for your viewers.

If your available bandwidth is limited, you should reduce both your resolution and your bitrate accordingly.

Audio Bitrate

The audio bits take up much less of the overall bandwidth than your video bitrate. In addition, the perceived quality gain at bitrates above 320kbps is minimal, so it is recommended to keep the audio bitrates within the ranges suggested above.

Audio Sample Rate

48000 Khz is the highest supported sample rate. Sample rates above this are unsupported and can cause a failure in the stream or recording.

Most production equipment will work at either 44100Khz or 4800Khz. It is recommended you match the sample rate of your stream with the output of your production equipment. A mismatch in sample rates can cause audio artifacts including drop outs, clicking, pitch changes or other problems.

Frame Rate

Frame rates should always match the frame rate of the video source.

NTSC standard equipment typically operates at 30 fps and in that case, encoding parameters should be configured to match the source frame rate of 30 fps.

PAL standard equipment typically operates at 25 fps and in that case, encoding parameters should be configured to match the source frame rate of 25 fps.

IBM Watson Media supports high frame rate (HFR) video. This is, the platform will ingest streams with frame rates higher than 30 fps up to 60 FPS Original HFR streams will be passed through. If cloud transcoding is deployed, all lower resolution renditions will be created using lower frame rates as specified in the configuration (for example, 30 or 25 fps).

HFR video imposes additional stress to player devices. Lower end devices such as certain laptops or smartphones could stutter or crash when playing HFR video. Therefore, many end users viewing on typical computers and mobile devices will not be able to properly decode 60 FPS streams and this can result in playback issues.

Video Codec

IBM Watson Media recommends h.264 and AAC-LC. These are the most widely compatible and efficient modern codecs. They offer the highest quality at the lowest bitrates.

h.264 Profiles

IBM Watson Media supports the H.264 profiles MAIN and HIGH. See table above for resolution suitability

Keyframe Interval

IBM Watson Media requires a fixed keyframe interval of 1 or 2 seconds. The default setting on some encoders may be different from this, so it is required to adjust it to meet this requirement for optimal adaptive bitrate performance and stream quality.

Some encoders may have settings like "auto keyframe interval" or "scene change detect." It is required to disengage these modes as they may result in an unpredictable keyframe interval.

IMPORTANT: Sending a stream with keyframes at intervals greater than 2 seconds or at irregular intervals can result in stream or recording failures. Please ensure you have a proper keyframe setting to avoid this.

Audio Codec

AAC-LC must be used for full compatibility with the IBM Watson Media streaming platform

Interlaced vs. Progressive

IBM Watson Media does not support ingestion of interlaced video. It is required that you de-interlace the image before sending the stream to the IBM Watson Media ingest server.

Sending interlaced video can result in stream or recording failure or degraded image quality.

If your camera can only send an interlaced image, many encoders will have the option to 'de-interlace' the video. Choose this option before sending to IBM Watson Media in order to avoid streaming issues.

For more information on interlacing, please read this article.

RTMP, Fragmented MP4, and HLS

IBM Watson Media currently utilizes 3 different protocols.

RTMP protocol is used for ingesting the streams from the source encoder.

A proprietary fragmented MP4 protocol is used to deliver to the IBM Watson Media HTML5 player for some playback environments.

HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is used to deliver streams for iOS, Android, some desktop browsers and other connected devices.

At this time, IBM Watson Media does not support direct ingest of HLS streams. Instead, IBM Watson Media's cloud transcoding is used to create the HLS versions from the incoming RTMP stream.

For details on IBM Watson Media's cloud transcoding and multiple bitrate streaming with IBM Watson Media, including the exact resolutions and bitrates that are delivered to desktop players and mobile devices, see our article multiple bitrate streaming with IBM Watson Media.

IP Cams, RTP, RTSP, HLS and other Streaming Protocols

Currently, IBM Watson Media only supports ingest of RTMP streams.

IBM Watson Media delivers streams to viewers via RTMP, HTTP and HLS.

If you have a IP Camera, or other device that can only deliver streams over RTSP.

Recommended Network Settings

Internet connection recommendations

For successful live streaming, you need a high-quality internet connection. A connection that is sufficient to check email or load web pages may not be good enough for streaming. You don't need "a" internet connection, you need a high quality internet connection, particularly to do uninterrupted HD streaming.

Not all connections are of the same quality. You want to use a wired ethernet connection and not use WiFi as WiFi connections are more prone to fluctuation in quality and can more easily drop.

Cellular (3G/4G/LTE) connections can be very unreliable. It is strongly recommended to use a hardwired ethernet connection or a WiFi connection over a cellular connection. But the type of connection is only one factor. For every type of connection, it is important to conduct bandwidth tests ahead of time to know you have sufficient bandwidth to stream.

It is important to use a connection which is not shared with many other users. For example, when streaming from a typical corporate office or event venue, the amount of bandwidth available for your stream may be inconsistent depending on the number of other users on the same network.

It is recommended to ask your IT department to dedicate bandwidth that is reserved solely for the stream. If you have plenty of bandwidth and not many users sharing the same bandwidth, this may not be necessary. But if you find you are on a shared connection and cannot always get adequate bandwidth, you may want to ask for this, or to try to minimize how many other users are on the same connection at the time of your stream.

In addition, it is recommended to share with your IT department our article on opening firewall ports for IBM Watson Media broadcasting and viewing.

If you are not on a corporate network or do not have an IT department to contact, you can check with your internet service provider to purchase a plan that has the appropriate level of service for streaming.

Network Bandwidth

When choosing your encoding settings you should take into account your available upload bandwidth.

A good rule of thumb is for the bitrate of your stream to use no more than 50\% of your available upload bandwidth capacity on a dedicated line. For example, if the result you get from a speed test shows that you have 2Mbps of upload speed available, your combined audio and video bitrate should not exceed 1Mbps.

To stream in HD, you'll want at least 3-8Mbps upload speed available

a generic speed test, such as the one at speedtest.net, should suffice to measure available bandwidth

If you find that your stream frequently rebuffers, pauses, or disconnects, try using a lower bitrate and resolution on your encoder.

Encoder Hardware Recommendations

CPU Resources

Ensure your encoding CPU / GPU can handle your encoding settings.

HD streams and high bitrate streams take significantly more CPU and GPU resources to capture and encode.

If your streams are choppy, pause and resume, exhibit encoding artifacts, are dropping frames or appear to be playing back in a lower than expected frame rate, these can all be signs that your CPU is not able to keep up with the live video encoding.

Reducing the input resolution size and or reducing your stream output resolution and bitrate can fix these issues.

Most encoders have an indicator to show you how much of your available resources you are using. Pay attention to this and lower your settings accordingly if it shows you are nearing the maximum resources available.

Low frame rate streams look very bad. Unless you have extremely low motion content like static slide images, often it would be better to stream full frame rate at a reduced resolution, for example 640x360 at 30fps vs 720HD but only being able to stream at 12 frames per second.

How to cancel Pro Broadcasting subscription

Once your cancellation is effective videos over 30 days old will be deleted. After newer videos become older than 30 days they will also be deleted. Please make sure to download any videos you want to save prior to cancelling. We have an article explaining this here.

Instructions on how to cancel your account:

Login to your account at https://video.ibm.com with your IBMid.

On your IBM Watson Media Dashboard, click "Account" and the Subscription menu.

This is your subscription overview page. From here, you can see your current Viewer Hour count, review billing dates, and change your plan type, including cancelation. You can cancel from the link called "Cancel Subscription"

Click on MyIBM dashboard and it will redirect you to your IBM Marketplace dashboard

On your MyIBM dashboard you can select Cancel plan and you can contact to the eCustomer care

Fill out the form of your cancelation and the Marketplace Support will inform you when the process is done.

Starting from January 2020 all IBM Video Streaming (former Ustream) business processes and systems regarding Silver, Gold and Platinum plans will transition to IBM Marketplace.

In this article we introduce how to manage subscription plan and access subscription details, invoices in our new system.

IBM Marketplace

To open IBM Marketplace please go to your IBM Video Streaming Dashboard by choosing menu Account / Subscription, and click on MyIBM dashboard link.

Marketplace Support

You will reach MyIBM Dashboard (authenticating with your MyIBM ID may be required) showing the details of your IBM Video Streaming subscription:

Billing and invoices

To check the details of your subscription and invoices click on My IBM link on the top left of the page then go to the Billing page:

Step 1: My IBM page

Step 2: Billing page

On the Billing page you get an overview of your order, and you can check further details of your IBM Video Streaming subscription on the Order page:

Step 3: Order page

Please scroll down through the page to access your previous invoices:

Please note: IBM Marketplace provides downloadable invoices after a processing time.

Managing Subscription: change plan or cancel

To manage your subscription please click on the MyIBM link on the top left of the page, then select Manage for IBM Cloud Video Streaming:

You will reach IBM Marketplace Overview page giving access to several actions, like:

Switch plan

Reach out to IBM eCustomer Care with Billing and invoices related requests

Cancel plan

Support

Getting stuck with billing and invoices? You can reach IBM Marketplace's customer support team via page.

Due to the acquisition of Ustream by IBM, we are required to charge tax to current Pro Broadcasting plan pricing. The tax will be dependent on the state that you input in your billing information. To help communicate this proactively, we sent an email out during the week of March 6th, 2017.

You will see the final price with the tax applied before you complete your purchase.

https://video.ibm.com/support-ticket

The tax will be effective starting April 3, 2017 and will be reflected on any invoice you receive after April 1, 2-17.

If you have any questions, please reply reach out to us via

If your company is claiming exemption from US sales tax, please submit a properly executed exemption certificate issued to IBM Corporation, along with your legal name and your IBM Watson Media account ID or email address, to the following email address: [email protected]

IBM Video Streaming subscription plans need to be migrated over to the IBM Marketplace Billing system. As part of this process, active plans are being cancelled automatically, and accounts are required to be migrated by the customer manually.

After your account has been cancelled, you will have access to IBM Video Streaming services until the end of your last billing period.

To keep using IBM Video Streaming with the content and settings of your legacy account, please follow these steps below to manually migrate your account to the IBM Marketplace.

1. Log in to the IBM Video Streaming Dashboard ( https://video.ibm.com/dashboard )

You will have access to all settings and contents until the end of your last billing period after the cancellation. During this period, when you visit the Subscription page on your IBM Video Streaming dashboard, you will see when your cancelled subscription ends.

You will only need to migrate your account after the last billing period has ended.

video.ibm.com

2. After the cancellation has been effective, (when the last billing period has ended), you can start migrating your account by logging in to the IBM Video Streaming Dashboard ( https://video.ibm.com/dashboard ) again.

When you log in, you will only have access to the page with a message about your cancelled account.

3. Check and note your email address for the migration of your account. (If you are having trouble or are unsure of your email to your account please submit a ticket to https://support.video.ibm.com/ with your account ID and we can provide the email that is on the account)

4. To start signing up via the IBM Marketplace, click "Select Plan".

5. Now select the plan you desire from the Pricing page.

6.Select the billing term (available only for Gold and Platinum plans) and click toContinue to checkout. If you reside in a different country besides the United States such as Canada or Japan, please select your country in the bottom right corner to update the currency for your plan. (Please note that certain IBM Products may not offered in certain countries).

7.In the following steps you need to use the same e-mail addresswhich was used onto login and create IBMid(See step 2.).

This is thekeypoint to connect your existing account to the new one. So ensure you use the same email originally used for your Watson Media streaming account and that you have access to it to verify.

-If you already have IBMid with this e-mail address you can login with it.

-Or you can create a new IBMid with this email address and simply fill the registration from.

-Verify your e-mail address (You will receive an email with the verification code)

8.Provide your billing and payment data. Unfortunately the IBM Marketplace does not accept a P.O. Box address at this time.(if you are from a different country other than the US and do not see your correct country listed please see step 5)

9. Make sure your order is correct,then submit your order.

10. After successful transaction (payment) you can see the summary of you order and you can navigate to MyIBM dashboard to manage your subscription.

11. On MyIBM dashboard you can manage your subscription details.

12.Or you can Launch (navigate to) video.ibm.com dashboard.

13.On video.ibm.com login page choose theLog in with your IBMidoption and login with your IBMid

Note: because you are already logged into the IBMid after the click to Log in with your IBMid probably you will redirected to the dashboard automatically.

14.After the login with your IBMid you can use video.ibm.com with your IBM Marketplace based subscription.

NOTE: If you cancel your subscription, upgrade or downgrade to a different plan, you may not beeligiblefor all of the features you had on your previous plan.

In order to downgrade or upgrade to a different plan please follow these instructions:

First, log into your IBM Watson Media account.After you log in, click on your username in the upper right corner.Click on “Dashboard”.Then click on "Account" and select the Subscription tab. You will be taken to your subscription overview page. Then click on "Choose Another Plan".

Click on the desired plan you would like to subscribe to.You will see a pop up confirmation box where you can click on “Change plan”.Click on "Change plan" to confirm your decision.

If you have chosen to upgrade your plan, you will be billed the difference in price between your current and your upgraded plan, and will have immediate access to the enhanced features and extra viewer hours of your new plan level. Your billing date will not change, and your next bill will reflect the full price of your new plan level.

If you have chosen to downgrade your plan, you will still have full access to all the features and viewer hours of your current plan level. Your plan level change will not take place until the end of your current billing period.

All IBM Watson Media accounts allow you to embed your live channel player or a recorded video, or the player sidebar which includes the chat and social stream on your own site or blog. Pro Broadcasting accounts provide additional features around embedding. This article covers where to find and how to use the different embedding features on IBM Watson Media.

Getting the embed code from the player

The simplest way to get the embed code for any live video or recorded video player is the following. For more advanced options, use the IBM Watson Media dashboard embed page.

Hover over the video player and in the lower right corner click on the Share menu.

From the share menu, click on the Embed option.

viewing troubleshooting tips.

Copy and paste the code that you will see in pop up box.

IBM Watson Media Dashboard embed page

Click on your user icon in the top right of your screen and click on Dashboard from the drop down menu.

From the Channel menu, click on Embed.

Now you will see the embed options screen:

Once you get to the Embed Codes page, choose between Player, Social, or Combined and click on Create Embed.

Copy the code displayed in the text box and paste into an HTML page to embed the video player on your own site.

You can also grab your video embed code by going to Videos, clicking on the arrow tab to the right of the video and select the option Embed.

Embedding the Sidebar

Free accounts can embed the chat or Social Stream via the sidebar. Pro Broadcasting Accounts (including Free trials) get the fully functional sidebar including a video gallery widget, Social Stream and Chat. As you change the options for your embed, the screen will show you a preview of what your embed will look like and the code will update to reflect the selected options.

Video playlist embed

Another new feature for embeds from IBM Watson Media, content owners can also embed video playlists onto websites as well. This embedded experience features the video player on the left and the playlist navigation on the right. When interacting with the playlist, viewers can see a list of both the content available and are also able to jump to a video of their choosing.

Naturally this feature also works with Dynamic Video Playlists as well, which are a type of playlist that are created based on matching metadata criteria. For example, a playlist could be setup that contains all videos tagged with a particular speaker or that are part of the same genre. Not only will the playlist auto populate based on the criteria, but will automatically stay updated as well. This means that if another video was added to the account that featured the same speaker or was part of the same genre it would be automatically added to the playlist as well and reflected in the embedded instance. Due to the Video Metadata Editor that allows for custom metadata, there are tons of different categories that content owners can create and use to make dynamic playlists too.

Below is an example of a playlist embed:

Playlist

Offers the ability to embed a video playlist which must include a side panel with both the info tab and playlist navigation inside of it.Click here for more information on creating a Video Playlist from the Dashboard.

Selecting the correct size for your embed

We recommend using IBM Watson Media's embed generator tool to configure the correct size for your embed. While you have a lot of flexibility in the size of your embeds, there are certain sizes that will work better than others to preserve the correct look and feel of the player and the sidebar. The dashboard embed generator tool will calculate the correct embed dimensions for you if you enter the desired height or width as a starting point.

Selecting the correct size for the player

The player won't stretch, squeeze or otherwise distort your video. Your video will always be presented in the aspect ratio it is streamed to us at -- typically, this is 16:9 aspect ratio. The player will scale up or down the video to the maximum size it can play at within the embed dimensions, while preserving the aspect ratio of the original video. Where a player is embedded in a non-standard aspect ratio, black sections will appear on the top or sides of the video in order for the video to be presented in its original format. If you use the sizing tool in either of our embed screens, it will always calculate the perfect 16:9 aspect ratio. The embed configuration tools do not calculate for any other ratios besides 16:9, but you can easily calculate the appropriate size yourself.

Example

640 x 360 is a 16:9 aspect ratio. If you enter 640 width in the embed configuration tool, it will fill in a height of 360.

Let's look at two examples of a player. One is embedded in the correct size: 640 x 360. If you look at the screenshot of the embedded player, you will notice the video fills the entire frame.

640 x 360 Embed

If we embed the same player with the wrong dimensions -- 750px wide rather than 640px wide -- you'll notice the player now has black space on the sides of the video.

750 x 360 Embed

Embedding a responsive player

Steps to create a responsive embed:

Get the player embed code described above and paste into an HTML page

Set the width and the height attributes of the iframe tag to 100\%

Change the CSS position of the iframe tag to 'absolute' and set the left and top CSS parameters to '0'

Add a div container around the iframe tag as it is shown by the following sample code. The value of the 'padding-bottom' parameter is calculated from the aspect ration of the content (e.g. 9/16 = 0.5625)

<div id="Container"

style="padding-bottom:56.25\%; position:relative;

display:block; width: 100\%">

<iframe width="100\%" height="100\%"

allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen

src="http://www.ustream.tv/embed/1524?html5ui=1"

frameborder="0"

style="position:absolute; top:0; left: 0">

</iframe>

</div>

Setting the Autoplay and Mute parameters

The embed configuration interface offers additional options for Pro Broadcasters. You can set your player to start playing automatically when the page is loaded. You can also opt to have the player start muted by default. It is useful to combine both of these options if you wanted to have a video play automatically on your page, but not have your site visitors be startled by the sound. Use the checkboxes in the embed configuration screen to toggle these settings and the code in the text box will update accordingly.

Hiding your embed codes and restricting where your player can be embedded

Pro Broadcasters have the option to hide their channel page, remove the embed codes from the player (so viewers cannot embed the player somewhere) and to also restrict where the stream can play. Combining all three of these options will allow you complete control that the stream (and any subsequent recorded videos) will only play on the page(s) you designate.

Restrict URLs where your channel can be embedded

Use this to only allow the stream and recorded videos to play on the domains or pages you specify.

This option is found under Channels > Security. From the Security page click on Settings

Disable channel page on IBM Domain

If you only want to have the player on your own site and don't plan to have anyone watch on your channel page from the IBM Domain, you can disable the channel page from the Channel page section.

This option is found under Channels > Channel page:

Remove embed codes from the player

Not on the embed page, but under Channel > Sharing, you will find an additional option to remove the sharing menu from the player. This will prevent users from obtaining the embed code and also from sharing the link to the channel page on Facebook and Twitter.

Troubleshooting problems with embedding your player

Most of the time, embedding is as simple as copying and pasting the code onto your own page and it should work automatically. If you are running into issues, here are some of the common problems and solutions.

I don't know where I'm supposed to paste this code!

If you have someone who updates your website for you, just copy and paste this and send it to them and they will know what to do with it. If you use Wordpress, here are instructions for embedding your player on Wordpress. If you don't use use Wordpress, but use another blogging or content management platform, usually you'll need to make sure you are editing in HTML mode (not a rich text / WYSIWYG editor), paste the code there and publish your page or post.

The player doesn't appear at all. I see a blank area where the player should be.

Some sites will be sensitive to the player loading from http or https. Try adding http:// or https:// in front of the www on your embed code.

It looks like I embedded the player, but I can't view the stream.

You need to host the player on a live webpage. If you are authoring your page in a local development environment and previewing the pages loaded from your local hard drive, the player will most likely not be able to pull a stream. If you are still having trouble viewing the stream, please see our

Most content on IBM Watson Media plays automatically. You should be able to view live streams and recorded videos without installing any additional software or doing anything special. If you are experiencing any issues watching content on IBM Watson Media, please read the problems and solutions below.

Try watching at a lower quality

Many streams are now available in multiple bitrates. IBM Watson Media Pro Broadcasting accounts allow for multiple bitrate broadcasting. If you are watching on mobile the bitrate will adjust automatically. If you are watching on a laptop / desktop computer, you can manually adjust the bitrate you are watching.

Check computer resources Hover over the player

Click on the text that says Best, 720, 480, 360 or 240

Select 240 and try watching on that. You may notice a lower quality video image, but the stream should be easier for your bandwidth and CPU to playback smoothly. If it is smooth at 240, you can try the next step up and so on.

Update Browser

We recommend viewing IBM Watson Media on an up-to-date version of Firefox or Chrome. Go here to get the latest version of Firefox or Chrome. One benefit of Chrome is that it already has Adobe Flash installed by default. If you need to use Internet Explorer and are having issues there are further Internet Explorer specific troubleshooting steps here.

Do not watch (monitor) the stream from the same machine you are streaming from

Install and Update Adobe Flash

Go here and follow the steps outlined on that page to make sure that you have an up to date version of Adobe Flash Player installed. Do this on the same computer and browser that you are trying to watch IBM Watson Media on.

Check Internet Connection and Bandwidth

You can only watch a live stream if you have a consistent internet connection. Shared wi-fi networks, like what you might find at a coffee shop, are often too unreliable to view a live stream without interruption. We recommend viewing on the best possible connection you can find.

You can run a speedtest here to determine your download speed. It can be helpful to run the test several times to see if you are getting consistent download speeds. To view an 720/HD stream, you need download speeds at around 1.5-2Mbps.

When possible, plugging in via an ethernet cable can help you avoid the possibility of an inconsistent wireless connection.

Check Computer Resources

A possible cause of choppiness or pausing playback is insufficient CPU resources on the broadcaster or the viewer side. Older computer's graphics cards may have a difficult time encoding and decoding live and recorded video. We recommend shutting down all other applications and browser tabs / windows while broadcasting and viewing if you are experiencing playback problems.

Watching content on IBM Watson Media can be fairly CPU intensive, especially the HD content. It is best to have a dual core system that is less than two years old that has a discrete (non-integrated) graphics card. Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 CPUs or the AMD equivalent are preferred. Netbooks or low power systems should be avoided. You can check the CPU load in the Task Manager (Windows) or Activity Monitor (Mac OS).

Disable or Enable Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration means that your computer's graphics card is used to render the stream on your screen rather than decoding and rendering in software. The advantage is typically smoother playback, less battery drain and less overheating. In some cases, hardware acceleration does not function properly and the stream will go black or you will see a "stuttering" or "skipping" effect where everything is jittering. If you see this symptom or are seeing low frame rate playback, try enabling or disabling hardware acceleration using these steps:

Right click on the player

Choose settings

Click on the far left tab that looks like a screen

Check or uncheck the box that says "Enable Hardware Acceleration"

Click close

Refresh the page

Check that IBM Watson Media content is not blocked by an ad-blocker, firewall, or being filtered on your local network.

Particularly if you are watching at a school or in a corporate environment, it is possible that a firewall or content filter is blocking IBM Watson Media content. If you see a black screen instead of the live video stream, this is one of the possible causes. If you have any ad-blockers installed, disable those in your browser. If you can talk to your network administrator or control it yourself, this article explains which ports need to be enabled to allow IBM Watson Media viewing and broadcasting through your firewall. If you are using a VPN, try disabling the VPN and viewing while not connected with a VPN.

Common Problems and Solutions

No video player, there is just a blank space where the player should be

Update browser

Update Flash

Stream is frequently re-buffering, looks "choppy," "laggy", "pausing" or "stop and go."

Watch at a lower quality

Update flash

Check bandwidth

Check computer resources

Disable or enable hardware acceleration

Black screen instead of a live video stream, even though I see a red "live" badge in the bottom of the player

Check bandwidth

Update flash

Disable or enable hardware acceleration

Watch at a lower quality

Check computer resources

Check that IBM Watson Media content is not being blocked by a firewall or content filtering from your local network.

Stream is playing back at a lower than expected frame rate

Check bandwidth

Update flash

Disable or enable hardware acceleration

Watch at a lower quality

Mobile Viewing

Most streams on IBM Watson Media are available for viewing on iOS and Android devices.

Basic/ Free accounts have basic mobile compatibility and IBM Watson Media Pro Broadcasting accounts are automatically optimized for mobile.

On Free / Basic accounts, the first viewer who begins watching from a mobile device may have to wait up to 30 seconds for the stream to load. On IBM Watson Media Pro Broadcasting accounts, every viewer should be able to watch the mobile stream instantly.

The following tips are recommended for mobile viewing:

Do not use private browsing mode on Safari on iOS

Use Wi-Fi rather than 3G or 4G connection whenever possible

IBM Watson Media now has a new feature to utilize your stream with a Backup channel. This article will explain how to set up your Primary channel with a Backup channel from the Dashboard.

First Login to your IBM Watson Media Dashboard and find your Primary channel under the Channels section. Next, scroll down the list to the Broadcast Settings section.

From the Broadcast Settings menu, select Edit settings inBackup Channels.

Next click Add Channel and enter in the the Backup Channel’s url or Backup Channel ID.

If you are having trouble locating the Backup channel’s url, this can be found under the Info section under the Channel tab on the Dashboard.

If you wish to remove the Backup channel, simply click remove orremove all.

We recommend that the Backup channel be dedicated to a separate network and power source than the Primary Channel, that way the Backup Channel cannot be affected of what compromises the Primary.

It is also recommend to set up Backup channels while both channels are not streaming LIVE to avoid streaming conflicts. Please enable Backup channels and make sure to test well before your main broadcast to ensure that channels failover correctly.

In order to broadcast or view streams, you will need to ensure that any firewall is configured to allow traffic on specific ports. A firewall can reside on your local machine, on your router, or as part of your corporate network.

Firewall settings needed for viewing streams

In order to watch IBM streams you have to create the following stateful firewall rules, assuming you have a regular internet connection:

Outgoing UDP destination port 53 to your nameserver or any IP for domain name resolution (DNS).

Outgoing TCP destination port 80, 443 to any IP for web.

Outgoing TCP destination port 1935 to any IP for streaming (RTMP).

Outgoing TCP destination ports 8001-8004 to IP ADDRESS RANGES below for web based chat.

Firewall settings needed for broadcasting

In order to Broadcast via IBM Watson Media you have to create the following stateful firewall rules, assuming you have a regular internet connection. In case you are behind a corporate firewall please ensure your IT department configures the firewall to accommodate these settings:

Outgoing UDP destination port 53 to your nameserver or any IP for domain name resolution (DNS).

Outgoing TCP destination port 80, 443 to IP ADDRESS RANGES below for web.

Outgoing TCP destination port 1935 to IP ADDRESS RANGES below for streaming (RTMP).

Optional: If you have secure ingest setup for your account, you will need to open these additional ports.

Outgoing TCP destination port 4444 to IP ADDRESS RANGES below.

Outgoing UDP destination port 2070-2090to IP ADDRESS RANGES below.

IP Address Ranges

List of IP address ranges you have to create firewall filters. Also see changelog below for updates.

In order to ensure a smooth experience, please whitelist *all* of the following IP address ranges regardless of which locations are closest to your streaming location.

IP

LOCATION

169.44.81.160/27

Dallas, TX, USA, North America

169.53.37.192/27

Dallas, TX, USA, North America

169.61.20.80/29

Dallas, TX, USA, North America

169.50.20.32/27

Frankfurt, Germany, Europe

161.202.59.160/27

Hong Kong, China, Asia

159.122.214.48/28

London, United Kingdom, Europe

169.50.194.128/27

London, United Kingdom, Europe

169.57.34.16/28

Quertaro, Mexico, North America

169.57.154.248/29

Sao Paulo, Brasil, South America

169.57.165.32/27

Sao Paulo, Brasil, South America

50.23.174.32/27

Seattle, WA, USA, North America

168.1.193.160/27

Sydney, Australia, Oceania

161.202.236.96/27

Tokyo, Japan, Asia

169.45.252.224/27

Washington, D.C., CO, USA, North America

169.47.38.32/27

Washington, D.C., CO, USA, North America

169.60.100.248/29

Washington, D.C., CO, USA, North America

169.38.91.128/28

Chennai, India, Asia

169.55.185.16/28

Toronto, Canada, North America

199.66.236.0/22

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

8.22.49.0/24

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

64.214.133.0/24

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

165.254.3.0/24

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

169.44.203.0/25

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

169.62.91.128/25

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

169.45.68.72/29

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

169.44.146.64/26

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

169.44.178.0/24

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

185.23.108.0/24

Amsterdam, Netherlands, Europe

161.202.195.128/27

Singapore, Singapore, Asia

169.56.78.32/27

Seoul, South Korea, Asia

Additional firewall settings needed for ECDN servers

ECDN servers are deployed behind customer firewalls. These servers act as local caches for the video streaming content. To pull down the content, they need outbound-to-Internet network connectivity. The list below indicates the IP address ranges on the Internet that should be reachable from the ECDN servers. No inbound connectivity from Internet is needed.

Used for setting the clock on the ECDN servers - outgoing UPD port 123. Required

Clock synchronization is needed for SSL connections to work. Either use a local NTP server(s) or open port 123 to:

[0-3].ubuntu.pool.ntp.org

Allow OpenVPN traffic over port 443 toterminator.deepcaching.com. Required

Sometimes, during server upgrades or when customers need additional help in diagnosing the issues, there is a need for ECDN operations team to remotely login to the servers.

ECDN Management Portal allows customers to selectively enable/disable a VPN connection from a ECDN server to an IBM Video ECDN server terminator.deepcaching.com in the cloud.

When enabled, it allows ECDN operations team to remotely login to this ECDN server, and help with the diagnosis.

The VPN tunnel establishes an OpenVPN connection via port 443. This requires the firewall to NOT block such outbound traffic via port 443 to terminator.deepcaching.com.

Allow 3128 port when child-parent proxy feature is enabled. Optional

From the ECDN server version 2.4.2 (20190724) the Child ECDN servers can use Parent ECDNs as proxy for HTTPS calls to connect to Internet. This is an optional feature and can be enabled by IBM via customer request.

When this feature is enabled then the port is used by Child servers to connect to the proxy services running on Parent ECDN nodes.

Domain names

Many enterprise customers use a proxy server to manage the HTTP and HTTPS traffic within their intranet. These proxy servers can become overwhelmed if all video streaming traffic is also channeled through them. To avoid this, proxy servers allow you to define an exclude list of domain names, which allows any traffic to these domains to bypass the proxy server.

IBM products uses several domain names as part of its service delivery. These domain names are categorized into:

Control plane - such as access to the web portal, support etc. - this traffic may flow via the proxy or bypass it.

ustream.tv

*.ustream.tv

ustreamstatic-a.akamaihd.net

ustvstaticcdn1-a.akamaihd.net

ustvstaticcdn2-a.akamaihd.net

*.deepcaching.com

video.ibm.com

*.video.ibm.com

*.services.video.ibm.com

ubuntu.pool.ntp.org

Data plane - large volume of video data as pulled by the video player - this traffic should bypass the proxy.

*.deepcaching.net

vod-cdn.ustream.tv

ustreamssl-a.akamaihd.net

uhsakamai-a.akamaihd.net

ustream.lldns.net

Frequently asked questions

My company uses a proxy service (like Zscaler) for all HTTP(S) traffic. Do I need to bypass all the IP address destinations listed on this page?

Yes. To reduce management overheads, we strongly recommend customers make firewall changesto ensure all IP addresses identified in this article to be are reachable. This is the minimal list.

IBM Watson Media offers video streaming services to customers around the world. Most enterprise customers have presence in multiple regions. Our services use source IP address of the player to make routing decision to the nearest ECDN configured for that location, or to the external CDN provider in that region. Routing all playback traffic through a centralized proxy may result in sub-optimal performance.

If customers are using proxy services like Zscaler, then it is required that all traffic to the above list of IP addresses be bypassed. Doing so will enable us to accurately route all playback requests to their closest ECDN servers or external CDN servers most appropriate based on the player's IP address.

Who owns the IP addresses listed on this page?

Unless explicitly qualified, all the IP addresses shown on this page are owned and managed by IBM.

How often the do the IP addresses mention in this article change? How much notice do you provide to customers before this list is changed?

The IP addresses mentioned in this article rarely change. If we do make any changes, we will give you 15 days notice to make the changes to the firewall settings.

Setting up firewall rules on Microsoft Windows

Windows 8

Windows 7

Windows XP

Setting up firewall rules on Mac OS X

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1507?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US - You have to replace the port numbers while creating the rules listed in our article above.

http://portforward.com/networking/static-Mac10.4.htm

Changelog

2018-06-26: IRC based chat was replaced by web based chat tool. Removed references to outdated IRC ports. You may delete any entries previously created for ports 843, 6667, 8076.

2018-05-11: Added the following IP addresses:

169.61.20.80/29

Dallas, TX, USA, North America

169.60.100.248/29

Washington, D.C., CO, USA, North America

2018-05-10: Removed the following IP addresses from the required list:

50.202.236.0/24

San Jose, CA, USA, North America

Prepare for ECDN deployment

Get access to your ECDN Management Portal

Your IBM sales representative will create an account for you to access the ECDN Management Portal during the evaluation phase.

If your company already has an ECDN account, then you may ask your local team responsible for the video delivery infrastructure which includes ECDN, to create a new ECDN portal login account for you. Your login must have Admin or SuperAdmin role privileges to setup ECDN servers. Learn more about ECDN user roles.

Once you have your login credentials, you can log in at https://ecdn.deepcaching.com.

Collect required information for your ECDN deployment

To start using the ECDN services, you will need to collect the following information, so that you can efficiently complete the configuration in the ECDN Management Portal, in order to deploy the server instances.

Create a list of locations where ECDN servers will be deployed. Assign a unique and descriptive name to each location that will help you identify it later (example: “San Francisco Office”). You can start deploying your first ECDN server instance with one location already.

For each location, add the external IP address range that is assigned to it in your enterprise. You will need to contact your network administrator for this information.

To create an ECDN server instance, you will need to specify its network settings that ensure that the server has outbound connectivity to the Internet. For servers that have static IP address you will need the local IP address, netmask, gateway and DNS server settings. Another important requirement for the proper operation is configuring time synchronization of the server correctly, i.e. setting NTP servers.

Configure your hypervisor host

You will also need access to a hypervisor host for your ECDN server instance. We support VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VM VirtualBox hypervisors.

You can start with the following configuration for one server instance: 1 vCPU (2 vCPUs recommended), 4 GB of memory, 4 GB of disk space. The host hypervisor should have at least 1 Gbps network connectivity. ( See detailed system requirements ).

Make sure to have the required privileges to the hypervisor server, so that you can create a new virtual machine instance. (Contact your local IT representative for this setting.)

Validate network connectivity to ECDN backend services

ECDN servers require network connectivity to the ECDN backend services. You need to validate this by ensuring that the endpoint https://api.deepcaching.com is accessible from the intranet network in which the ECDN servers will be deployed.

Update your firewall settings

In order to broadcast or view streams, you will need to ensure that any firewall is configured to allow traffic on specific ports and from specific IP address ranges. A firewall can reside on your local machine, on your router, or as part of your corporate network.

Learn more about whitelisting IP address ranges in firewall settings

Create your first ECDN instance

Creating an ECDN instance is a 4-step process:

Define locations in the ECDN Management Portal

Configure ECDN server in the Management Portal

Deploy the ECDN server instance in your hypervisor host

Validate the installation

We describe each step in more details in following sections.

1. Define locations in web portal

Access the ECDN Management Portal using your login credentials.

Your starting page is the list of your locations that will be empty upon your first login.

Install ECDN server on Microsoft Hyper-V

Click the Add new location button, it will open the form where you can define the new location.

Enter a unique name for the location.

Set parent (if this is a child location).

Enter the external IP addresses/address ranges you want to enable ECDN traffic for.

Set your preference for client connections. If you enable client connections, you can also set preference for external CDN fallback.*

Click the Add button to save your settings and create the location.

*External CDN Fallback

If enabled, clients can request content from external CDNs if the pre-defined ECDN edges are unavailable or fail to deliver content.

If disabled, internal clients will use ECDN servers only for downloading the video streams.

Note: Too many clients connecting to external sources can cause overload on the corporate Internet connection. In case all the ECDN servers become unavailable and the external CDN fallback is disabled, the playback will be interrupted until an ECDN server becomes available and operational again.

Defining multiple locations

You can start configuring your first ECDN server instance with one location already, but you can also add multiple locations before deploying ECDN servers.

After you have added at least one location, the Add new... button will appear above the list of locations, from where you can repeat the above steps to add all your locations.

Multi-tier network

You can also create a multi-tier structure of locations that will define upstream and downstream servers in your corporate network.

Learn more about configuring a multi-tier network

2. Configure ECDN server in the Management Portal

After you have created your locations, you are ready to configure your ECDN servers.

To add a new server, navigate to Your servers (click Servers in the page header) and click the Add new server button.

Clicking the Add new server button will display the page where the server configuration is a step-by-step process.

After you have entered all required information, you will be able to download a virtual CD with the configuration file, as well as the required disk image for your hypervisor to deploy your ECDN server.

For detailed information on the configuration, see How to configure an ECDN server.

3. Deploy the ECDN server instance on your hypervisor host

After you have configured your hypervisor host, and downloaded the appropriate files, you can start deploying the ECDN server instance.

Please follow the specific steps according to your type of hypervisor:

Install ECDN server on VMware vCenter

Install ECDN server on VMware ESXi

4. Validate the installation

Go to your ECDN Management Portal and check the status of the ECDN server you have just deployed.

Navigate to the list of your servers by selecting Servers in the top navigation.

Locate the recently deployed ECDN server in the list, and click to open its detailed view.

In the detailed view, you can check the “Health status” of the server, as well as the status various service daemons running on the instance. Performance metrics are displayed as charts that show values for the past 6 hours.

Cisco Webex clients who are also on IBM Video Streaming for Enterprise can now stream Webex Meetings via the IBM Streaming Platform.

This feature is currently in BETA and can be turned on via the Webex Admin portal via the User Management console. (Please note that the integration requires an IBM Enterprise Video Streaming account)

You can find the Enable Live Streaming checkbox in Webex Meetings under User Management > Edit User privilege

Integration Benefits

Host can stream with a few clicks

Stream to more than 100k viewers

Audience can be restricted by SSO

Engagement modules like Q&A

VOD is automatically archived in the Video Streaming Portal

AI-driven processes applied to archives

How to stream to IBM Enterprise Video Streaming via Cisco Webex Meetings

Start a Webex Meeting.

Once the Webex Meeting is running click on the options button.

There will be an option to "Start Live Streaming." Clicking on this option will walk you through the process of signing into your IBM Enterprise Video Streaming account

Once signed in, you will be prompted to choose the organization and channel that you would like to stream to.

After choosing the channel clicking on Start Streaming will stream the Webex UI to your Video Streaming Channel including screens shared in Webex Meetings.

To share the Channel URL users can click the Live link in the top bar, and copy the Channel where the Webex Meeting is being broadcast to.

Alternatively, Webex Meetings users can also invite participants with the invite button, and paste in their Channel URL into the invite for easy access.

Once a Webex session is finished through the integration, IBM Watson Media AI analyzes the content allowing for:

Archives to be automatically assigned to channels and published in video portal.

Closed captions to be generated automatically.

Users to search for relevant content based on what was said, both at the library level and then searching inside videos to jump to relevant moments.

You can easily stream live video with multiple audio tracks for your multi-language audience using an encoder device that supports multiple RTMP outputs over the same RTMP connection.

Note: This feature is available only for our Enterprise broadcasting users.

Configure your encoder

1. Look up your RTMP URL and Channel Key

Look up your RTMP URL and Channel Key on theEncoder settings page of your channel on the IBM Watson Media Dashboard. Simply go to Dashboard Channels (the channel of your choice) Broadcast settings Encoder settings:

2. Set up one video track on your encoder

Open the configuration page of your encoder device. Create a video-only output (without audio). Enter the RTMP URL and Channel Key as needed. Ifa single URL is requested, enter:

[RTMP URL]/[Channel Key][Unique Number]

Unique Number is simply an integer number unique among the RTMP outputs you are using simultaneously with the same Channel Key. For example: 1, 2, 3.

Example: rtmp://1234.fme.ustream.tv/ustreamVideo/1234/123456789ABCDEFGH1

Note: if this output contains audio track, then its language will be set to Default audio language of the channel, and should not be overridden by a different Language Parameter.

3. Set up multiple audio-only tracks on your encoder, one for each language

For each language you want to stream, follow these steps:

Look up the Language Parameter in the Appendix below.

Create an audio-only output (without video). Enter the RTMP URL and Channel Key as needed, but add a language specific suffix at the end (|language=[Language Parameter]). Ifa single URL is requested, enter:

[RTMP URL]/[Channel Key][Unique Number]|language=[Language Parameter]

For example: rtmp://1234.fme.ustream.tv/ustreamVideo/1234/123456789ABCDEFGH3|language=en-GB

Repeat this for each language that you want to stream.

Configure your default broadcast language

Select the language that viewers will hear by default when the Player starts playing your live video. Simply go to Dashboard Channels (the channel of your choice) Broadcast settings Encoder settings:

Make sure you select a default audio language that you actually ingest live.

Video recordings of your multilingual live video stream will contain all properly streamed audio tracks, and will also inherit this default audio language setting.

Review audio languages while streaming live

Double check the languages that viewers can select from while watching your live video. After starting your encoder to live stream multi-language video, simply go to Dashboard Metrics and monitoring Live monitoring (the channel of your choice).

In the Stream setup section you can see real time information on the languages that are being ingested properly.

Review multi-language video recordings

When streaming multi-language live video, your content is recorded automatically. All properly ingested audio tracks are stored in the recording and viewers can select which language to play in the on-demand video just like when watching it live.

For each of your multi-language videos you can review and edit the language tags for each stored audio track. You can also change the default audio language of the recorded video.

Appendix: List of language codes for your encoder

For each language you would like to stream live, add the Parameter value from the sheet below (eg. "en-US" for US English) to the end of the stream key of the audio track you are about to stream with your encoder device.

Language

Parameter

Not applicable (eg. music)

mis

Multilingual (varying)

mul

Arabic

ar-00

Chinese

zh-00

English (UK)

en-GB

English (US)

en-US

French

fr-00

Japanese

ja-00

Portuguese (Brazil)

pt-BR

Spanish

es-00

Abkhazian

ab-00

Afar

aa-00

Afrikaans

af-00

Albanian

sq-00

Amharic

am-00

Arabic (Egypt)

ar-EG

Armenian

hy-00

Assamese

as-00

Aymara

ay-00

Azerbaijani

az-00

Bangla

bn-00

Bashkir

ba-00

Basque

eu-00

Belarusian

be-00

Bihari

bh-00

Bislama

bi-00

Bosnian

bs-00

Breton

br-00

Bulgarian

bg-00

Catalan

ca-00

Chinese (China)

zh-CN

Chinese (Hong Kong)

zh-HK

Chinese (Simplified)

zh-04

Chinese (Singapore)

zh-SG

Chinese (Taiwan)

zh-TW

Chinese (Traditional)

zh-05

Corsican

co-00

Croatian

hr-00

Czech

cs-00

Danish

da-00

Dutch

nl-00

Dutch (Belgium)

nl-BE

Dutch (Netherlands)

nl-NL

Dzongkha

dz-00

English (Canada)

en-CA

English (Ireland)

en-IE

Esperanto

eo-00

Estonian

et-00

Faroese

fo-00

Fijian

fj-00

Finnish

fi-00

French (Belgium)

fr-BE

French (Canada)

fr-CA

French (France)

fr-FR

French (Switzerland)

fr-CH

Galician

gl-00

Georgian

ka-00

German

de-00

German (Austria)

de-AT

German (Germany)

de-DE

German (Switzerland)

de-CH

Greek

el-00

Greenlandic (Kalaallisut)

kl-00

Guarani

gn-00

Gujarati

gu-00

Hausa

ha-00

Hebrew

iw-00

Hindi

hi-00

Hindi (Phonetic)

hi-01

Hungarian

hu-00

Icelandic

is-00

Igbo

ig-00

Indonesian

id-00

Interlingua

ia-00

Interlingue

ie-00

Inuktitut

iu-00

Inupiaq

ik-00

Irish

ga-00

Italian

it-00

Javanese

jv-00

Kannada

kn-00

Kashmiri

ks-00

Kazakh

kk-00

Khmer

km-00

Kinyarwanda

rw-00

Korean

ko-00

Kurdish

ku-00

Kyrgyz

ky-00

Lao

lo-00

Latin

la-00

Latvian

lv-00

Lingala

ln-00

Lithuanian

lt-00

Luxembourgish

lb-00

Macedonian

mk-00

Malagasy

mg-00

Malay

ms-00

Malayalam

ml-00

Maltese

mt-00

Maori

mi-00

Marathi

mr-00

Moldavian

mo-00

Mongolian

mn-00

Myanmar (Burmese)

my-00

Nauru

na-00

Navajo

nv-00

Nepali

ne-00

Norwegian

no-00

Occitan

oc-00

Odia

or-00

Oromo

om-00

Pashto

ps-00

Persian

fa-00

Persian (Afghanistan)

fa-AF

Persian (Iran)

fa-IR

Polish

pl-00

Portuguese

pt-00

Portuguese (Portugal)

pt-PT

Punjabi

pa-00

Quechua

qu-00

Romanian

ro-00

Romansh

rm-00

Rundi

rn-00

Russian

ru-00

Russian (Phonetic)

ru-01

Samoan

sm-00

Sango

sg-00

Sanskrit

sa-00

Scottish Gaelic

gd-00

Serbian

sr-00

Serbian (Cyrillic)

sr-02

Serbian (Latin)

sr-01

Serbo-Croatian

sh-00

Shona

sn-00

Sindhi

sd-00

Sinhala

si-00

Slovak

sk-00

Slovenian

sl-00

Somali

so-00

Southern Sotho

st-00

Spanish (Latin America)

es-03

Spanish (Mexico)

es-MX

Spanish (Spain)

es-ES

Sundanese

su-00

Swahili

sw-00

Swati

ss-00

Swedish

sv-00

Tagalog

tl-00

Tajik

tg-00

Tamil

ta-00

Tatar

tt-00

Telugu

te-00

Thai

th-00

Tibetan

bo-00

Tigrinya

ti-00

Tongan

to-00

Tsonga

ts-00

Tswana

tn-00

Turkish

tr-00

Turkmen

tk-00

Twi

tw-00

Ukrainian

uk-00

Urdu

ur-00

Uzbek

uz-00

Vietnamese

vi-00

Volapk

vo-00

Welsh

cy-00

Western Frisian

fy-00

Wolof

wo-00

Xhosa

xh-00

Yiddish

yi-00

Yoruba

yo-00

Zulu

zu-00

When you have access to an Enterprise Video Streaming (EVS) portal and at least one channel in that portal, you can search directly for specific videos on that channel. You'll first need to go to the URL of your company's EVS portal page or channel page, with the steps explained here.

The portal page will show those channels in the portal that you have been given access to. In the example below, one channel is currently broadcasting live, while the other channel was live just recently. In either case, you would be able to access recorded videos, but we'll focus on the channel that is not currently live:

off air content

Once you have accessed the channel you wish to search from, the player will be playing either live content if the channel is live, or whatever has been set for the channel. Below the player, you will see a tab for videos, a tab for upcoming events, and a search bar.

You can choose to browse through the videos displayed in the video gallery, but you can also search for a particular video. The search keywords are pulled from the name of each video. For example, we can see a video named 'Quarterly meeting' in the gallery. Were this video deeper in the gallery, we could surface it for play by searching for 'quarterly' in the search field, and hitting Enter:

By clicking on the thumbnail of the video in the gallery, the video will begin playing on demand in the player above.

Sorting Video Results

Videos can be sorted by:

Relevancy

Newest

Oldest

Most viewed

Shortest

Longest

All videos are sorted based on relevancy by default. Users can change sorting in the result page on the top right corner.

Relevancy is calculated based on:

Search phrases found in Description, Video Title, Labels or Caption

Recency of the video

Number of views of the video

Search Operators

When multiple search terms are typed into the search bar, by default an OR logic is applied when executing search. So, if either of the added words are present then the video will be listed out as a result. For example, when typing in “Design Thinking” then if either or both “Design” or “Thinking” is present, then the video will be returned. Also, there is an option to add search operators between words. The following operators are supported:

OR Requires that either term (or both terms) be present for a match.

AND Requires both terms on either side of the Boolean operator to be present for a match.

NOT Requires that the following term not be present.

Please, note that the search is not case sensitive. However, the operators need to be used in uppercase.

What are viewer hours?

To pick the right Pro Broadcasting plan, you have to understand what viewer hours are.

It is a combination of two factors- how many viewers watch your stream and for how long.

Viewer hours are calculated on live, recorded (video on demand) and live playlist content. Your viewer hour total is shared by all channels you have created on your Pro Broadcasting account.

Example could be

1 viewer is watching your show for 1 hour = 1 viewer hour

100 viewers watch your show for 1 hour each = 100 viewer hours

Please, see our article: What happens after I run out of my viewer hours?

In addition to the Web Broadcaster, you can also stream to IBM Watson Media using a variety of third-party encoding products. This compatibility with most encoding products on the market offers you an excellent number of choices for streaming, from free and easy-to-use, to robust and configurable encoders that offer enterprise-grade professional features.

If you're new to the world of encoding, we recommend you get started by reading our Guide to recommended encoding solutions and also make sure you are familiar with IBM Watson Media's recommended encoding specs. And don't forget to read the manual for whatever product you buy! By learning your encoder's settings and following recommended encoding settings, you can combine the power of industry-leading hardware and software with the industry-leading streaming platform.

Note on plugins:Many third party encoders have built in plugins that allow a user to enter their login using their IBM Watson Media(or other service) credentials to access their endpoints for streaming. We have discovered that connecting via the old Ustream plugin, or logging in with your IBM Watson Media credentials, can cause broadcasting issues. To avoid this, please connect via manual RTMP configuration as opposed to using IBM Watson Media or the older Ustream login credentials and select a channel.

You can find instructions for streaming to IBM Watson Media for some of the most popular encoders here, or follow the instructions below to obtain the RTMP server address and the stream name for your IBM Watson Media channel and consult your encoder's manual for how to send RTMP streams.

Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE)

Wirecast

NewTek Tricaster

Capella Cambria Live

Kulabyte

ViewCast

Elemental

Cisco Media Processor (formerly Inlet Spinnaker)

Obtaining the RTMP Address and stream name for your channel

Hover over your user icon in the top right of your screen and click on Dashboard from the drop down menu.

Click on Channel>Broadcast Settings or Broadcast settings in the overview section as seen below

Click on 'view' to the right of the Encoder Settings field.

Copy the RTMP address and the Stream Key from the IBM Watson Media Encoder Settings page.

Paste these into the corresponding fields in your encoding software. These fields often have different names depending on your software.

IBM Watson Media Remote Record Console

The remote console allows you to control your stream and interact with your viewers while streaming. Click Launch Remote Console from the Encoder Settings tab to open this panel.

Recording your streams

Click on the record tab and use the record button to start and stop recordings on your channel.

Share menu

The share menu allows you to get a link to your channel and share it on Facebook and Twitter. Also, typing a message in this box and hitting send will email all the followers of your channel on IBM Watson Media. Click on the Twitter or Facebook, buttons to send your message to followers on any of these platforms.

Chat

Use the chat tab to moderate your social stream and chat with your viewers.

There are 5 different methods of saving a recording of your broadcast onto your channel. Which one you use will depend on what encoder you are using.

Recording with the web broadcaster

Recording on the mobile App

Recording using a 3rd party encoder

Recording automatically on your channel

Recording with the web broadcaster

With our Web Broadcaster you can easily record a live broadcast, or record a video without broadcasting, by clicking on the "Start Record" button at the bottom right of the window.

Saving autorecorded broadcasts

When you are ready to stop recording, hit the "Stop Recording" button:

Fill out the prompted information (all fields are required) and click "Save"

You will now be able to find your recorded video in your channel by going to Dashboard -> Channel -> Videos, where you can access all our video functionalities.

NOTE:Broadcasts recorded in this manner will be limited to 3 hours. Unlike broadcasting from the web broadcaster or the remote console, a new recording will not automatically begin after the 3 hour mark. If you plan on recording more than 3 hours, use the remote record console instead.

Recording on the mobile App

To record on the app, simply begin your broadcast. When you stop broadcasting, you will automatically be prompted to title your broadcast. Be sure to hit 'Save' after doing so.

Recording automatically on your channel

Pro Broadcasters have the option to set their channels to automatically make a recording any time they go live! In order to do so:

log in to your account and go to Channel Settings in your dropdown menu.

Select the name of the channel you wish to set automatic recording for, and go to the Broadcast settings tab. Click on Settings to the right of the Auto-recording option.

To set autorecording for the channel, simply check the box. You can also set whether or not your autorecordings will be publicly available or private by default by accessing the dropdown menu in this tab.

Please note- automatic recordings are only saved by default on your channel for 30 days. You will need to manually save the autorecordings in your video management tab in order to preserve them.

Managing your videos

If you have an outstanding balance on your account, you will need to pay the overdue balance before continuing to use the service or canceling your subscription. Usually, outstanding balance notifications are due to incorrect credit card information on the billing page.

To solve this, you will need to insert the new credit card information under Account and Subscription. After inserting the correct credit card information, you will want toRetry your payment.

To do this, click on Account and then click on Payment history. Here you can view or download all of your previous invoices. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you should see Download Invoice andRetry. To retry the payment, please clickRetry.

ECDN has three runtime components:

ECDN servers - VMs that run in your intranet. It is shipped as a virtual appliance. See specifications below.

ECDN Management Portal - runs in the cloud and accessed via a browser.

ECDN Backend services - set of api services that run in the cloud to support the ECDN service.

System requirements for ECDN server VM instances

Software for ECDN server is shipped as a virtual appliance image file, one for each supported hypervisor. During installation, you will use these image files to create ECDN server VM instances.

ECDN virtual appliance uses:

Operating system

Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS (modified)

The minimum requirements for ECDN server VMs are:

CPU

1 vCPU (2 vCPUs recommended)

Memory

4GB RAM

Storage

4GB of disk space

Optionally - you may attach a second hard disk to enable persistence of VOD cache content to disk. When this second hard disk is not attached, both live and VOD streams are cached in memory (and are lost when VMs are rebooted). The size of this second disk can be any. We suggest, the optimal size to at least be 20\% of the size of your VOD library.

Supported hypervisors are:

VMware ESXi

version 6.5

virtual appliance shipped as a .OVA file

Microsoft HyperV

versionR2 2012

virtual appliance shipped as a .VHDX file

The host hardware can have:

Network interface

1Gbps or 10Gbps NICs

ECDN server VMs may be deployed in a shared or dedicated host server.

Notes:

With video streaming, the network capacity is usually the most constraining factor.

Inbound WAN bandwidth limits the number of video streams that can be watched at the same time.

Outbound LAN bandwidth limits the number of viewers that can be served by one ECDN server.

You may deploy more than one ECDN server VM on the same host hardware to the extent that the underlying host NIC is not over-subscribed.

Number of viewers supported by one ECDN server instance

The number of viewers that can be supported by one ECDN server instance depends on:

The bitrate of the incoming video stream, and ...

The capacity of the NIC in the host hardware.

Consider the following example. Assume you have a:

You want to support one 1080p (3Mbps bitrate) video stream, and ...

... the host hypervisor has 1Gbps NIC.

Network flow overhead = 20\%

The bandwidth calculations would be:

Inbound WAN bandwidth: 3Mbps

Outbound LAN bandwidth: 3Mbps / viewer

Number of viewers

=

(Total NIC capacity * 0.8) Inbound bandwidth

=

800Mbps 3Mbps

=

265

Outbound LAN bandwidth

3Mbps

If the hypervisor has a 10Gbps NIC, the number of supported viewers scales up to 2,665.

Notes:

Required inbound bandwidth increases when for the same video, there are multiple bitrates streams that are sent to the server.

Required inbound bandwidth also increases when there are multiple broadcast streams being watched at the same time from a given location.

Lower bitrate streams reduces the per-viewer bandwidth requirement, and more viewers will be able to connect to the same ECDN server.

Note: Depending on your account type, if you have a legacy Ustream account you may have slightly different options shown in the interactiviy tab of your account dashboard. You can find an overview of these options in the section of this article titled 'legacy interactivity options'.

Article sections:

Enabling or disabling the chat or Q&A tabs

Chat settings

Q&A settings

Legacy interactivity options

Enabling or disabling the chat or Q&A tabs:

Hover over your username in the upper right corner and click on Dashboard

Using the Social Stream

In the vertical menu on the left side, click Channels

Click on the name of the channel that you wish to change the settings for. This will open up the channel menu page.

Click on Interactivity

The Interactivity tab will allow you to configure settings for either the chat or the Q&A tab.

Enabling chat settings:

To enable chat for your channel, click the 'Settings' link to the right of the chat field. (For Q&A, do the same to the 'Settings' link to the right of Q&A)

Clicking on the radio button next to 'Enable chat' will make the Chat module appear on your channel page. Clicking on the 'Settings' link to the right of the Moderators field will allow you to add users who can function as moderators for chat on your channel.

Adding moderators to your chat module:

Moderators can be added below the enable / diable field on the Chat tab. You can add them by email address, or also by SAML ID if your account is a legacy Ustream Align or a Streaming Manager for Enterprise account type.

Enabling the Q&A module for your channel:

To enable the Q&A module on your channel, click settings to the right of the Q&A field, just as is done with Chat.

Q&A has multiple options that can be modified once the module has been enabled. These are shown in the image below, and described in the list below the image.

Open Q&A: this button allows you to open the Q&A module without being on the channel page itself.

Enable Q&A: this toggle button activates or deactivates the Q&A module on your page, and expands the other options on this page.

Visibility options: this section allows you to set how the Q&A module shows the questions actually posted by viewers.

Voting: enabling voting makes a small up arrow appear to the left of questions in a Q&A module, which will then show a 'vote' for a particular question.

Export questions: you can export the questions on a Q&A module in the given date range.

After making any changes, be sure to click Save in order to make your changes take effect.

Legacy interactivity options:

If you have a legacy Ustream product, such as a Pro Broadcasting account, your interactivity settings may look a bit different. For example, you may have access to a Social Stream setting, or to our legacy Flash chat type. In this case your Interactivity tab may look like this:

The Social Stream and Twitter tabs allow users to share messages from your tab over to their social media accounts. This functionality is described in our support article, .

We are regularly enhancing the IBM ECDN service with new capabilities and fixing defects. Here are the new changes across all three components of ECDN:

ECDN Management PortalPortal

Virtual appliance for the ECDN serverServer

ECDN backend servicesBackend

September 2019

Server From version 2.4.2 the child ECDN servers can use parent ECDNs as proxy for HTTPS calls to connect to Internet. This is a resilient solution, so if a parent server becomes unavailable then child ECDNs will not be impacted, given that other parent ECDNs are functional.

March 2019

Server ECDN now supports SSH-key based logins into servers. With this ECDN servers will be more compliant with enterprise security standards.

Portal In line with customers’ needs we have added a brand new user management system. Now within ECDN portal three different roles per user can be added: SuperAdmin, Admin and Reader. Additionally, all SuperAdmins can now see and manage the list of all ECDN users. You can learn more about user roles in the support article at http://ibm.biz/ecdn-user-roles

January 2019

Portal You can now define a recurring daily or weekly maintenance window in the ECDN portal. At the specified time, an automated process will be initiated to download all available upgrades and security patches. This will help ensure all ECDN servers in your network are running the latest release, and have all known security patches installed. We also allow you to temporarily disable automated upgrades to meet your enterprise network freeze requirements, typically seen during end of quarter or end of year.

October 2018

Server Some enterprise IT guidelines enforce strict naming rules for ECDN servers. In these cases, you will have to yourself manage the custom domain name. You will have to additionally order a SSL certificate for this domain, and manually install them on ECDN servers. Read more about how to setup SSL certs on ECDN servers.

August 2018

Portal Manually control what ECDN servers, a player can connect to. You can now specify a whitelist of blacklist of private IP addresses as part of an ECDN location definition. Once enabled, ECDN servers will only respond to playback requests as per these rules. Read more about how to setup these rules.

April 2018

Server ECDN service is now GDPR compliant.

March 2018

Portal Added support for historical usage reports. You will now be able to retrieve ECDN usage reports for any duration within the past two years. Read more about Getting historical usage reports.

January 2018

Portal You can now optionally enable using a disk based cache for storing the recorded videos. The cache contents will not be lost when the ECDN server is rebooted. Previously, with memory based cache, VOD cache contents were lost when the server was rebooted. VOD contents are cached on first request. When full, the oldest content is deleted to make space for the new video being streamed. To enable this feature, just add a second hard disk to the ECDN server VM in the hypervisor and restart it. No other configuration steps are needed. Read more about enabling VOD cache persistence to disk.

Portal Server list page displays which ECDN servers have enabled the VOD cache persistence to disk. Server details page displays the size of the cache disk, how much of it has been used.

ServerNew version to fix the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.

October 2017

Backend In case of CDN fallback, ECDN servers will use the new IBM Watson Media content delivery network (CDN) that is available worldwide.

Portal When configuring a new ECDN location, an IBM Watson Media midgress region should be selected by the customer from now on. For existing locations, a default value has been defined for midgress region.

Server We have added support for midgress regions in the virtual appliance.

August 2017

Portal Support for "multi-tier topologies" of ECDN servers. Now you can organize the locations of ECDN server instances in a multi-tier hierarchy. This gives you the flexibility in defining the video content distribution architecture that matches your company's unique network design. ECDN servers can be configured to a maximum of 3 levels (two levels of mid-tier servers + 1 leaf level). Read more about multi-tier deployments of ECDN servers and how to set them up in a multi-tier hierarchy.

Backend The IBM managed domain name has changed to deepcaching.net. For all customers who pick the option for IBM managed domain, a domain name like *.<customerName>.deepcaching.net will be assigned to their ECDN server instances.

Portal New "Update remotely" option added for propagating configuration changes from portal to the edge server instance. With this option the edge server auto-detects the configuration changes, downloads and installs it. The manual option, while still available, is no longer needed where you had to manually download the virtual CD image file, then attach it to the edge instance VM in the hypervisor, and reboot the VM to complete the change. The web portal displays "Pending changes" status for the edge server, while the changes are being propagated. Learn more about configuration update options for ECDN servers.

Portal All new configuration setting values are highlighted in a different color. The highlights are removed when the changes are successfully propagated to the edge server instance.

Server Edge servers now have remote configuration update capabilities for propagation of configuration changes.

Portal New "Remote assistance" checkbox. You now have control to enable/disable the VPN tunnel connection to ECDN backend for each edge server instance. By enabling Remote assistance, you can let ECDN support team remotely login to the edge server instance, and help with debugging and fixing it.

Server Edge servers have remote assistance capability to control the VPN tunnel connection.

Portal The status for all service daemons is now displayed in the edge server details page. New additions to the list of services are: Metrics service, SNMP polling, Log forwarding and Remote assistance.

Portal The "System health" widget that indicates the overall health of the edge server instance, now shows "Poor" status when the edge server instance is under load. It indicates that the edge server may be at capacity, and may need additional hardware resources. This aggregate status is based on: available memory, available disk space used by caching service, and number of player connections.

Portal In the "Edge servers" widget, we now display the health status details popup when your cursor hovers over the aggregate health status dot indicator in the "Health" column. This makes it easier to identify the unhealthy services. Now you don't have to go to navigate to the edge details page to get this information.

Server Now, by default, all edge server instances automatically failover to IBM Watson Media content origin servers, whenever there is an outage in any external 3rd party CDN vendor service.

Server Each edge server now uploads health status of various service daemons running inside it to the ECDN backend services.

Server Improved memory management of edge servers ensures that more memory is available to cache the video content.

Server Edge server instances now cache the DNS responses, thereby reducing the calls to customer's DNS servers. This makes the ECDN edge service more resilient to DNS outages.

Backend When no heartbeats are received for more than 2 minutes from an edge server, from now on, that instance is marked as unavailable to serve video traffic.

Backend Fixed the issue where ECDN portal would not show any metrics in the Player and buffering graph for edge servers that had any upper case letters in their hostnames.

If your IBM Watson Media account has been enabled with an Organization, you can assign your team administrators to manage the entire organization or only specific channels using the Administrator Permissions Feature. For more information about Organizations, please see the Organizational Level Management article.

How to specify channel access for administrators:

In order for your administrators to manage specific channels in your account, you’ll need to edit their permissions under the Organization settings page, found under your list of Organizations.

video.ibm.com

Then click Manage next to Administrators.

Then click the “Add people” and enter the company email address of the person you would like to manage specific channels. If you would like the person to manage everything in the organization (including settings, other administrators, accounts, channels and videos) select Organization administrator.

If you would like the person to manage only specific accounts, channels and videos, select Custom permissions. Then you will see all of the accounts found under this specific Organization. You can select between three account level access rights:

Administrator can manage the account, channels and videos.

Channel level access allows the administrator to access the account and manage selected channels.

No access setting completely blocks the access to the account.

If you want to manage which specific channels this user has access to, select Channel level access. This will display all of the available channels under this account. Here you can select from one of the Access Levels:

Administrator can manage the channel, videos and access individual viewer tracking.

Manager can manage the channel and videos.

No access setting blocks the user from accessing the channel at the Dashboard.

Once you’ve completed the appropriate settings, press Done.

Now when that specific administrator logs into their account at the video.ibm.com login page, they will see the specific account they have access to. Under channels, they will only see the channels and features they have been provided access to.

To log in, your new administrator will go to and either select “Log in with your IBMid” or “Log in with your company account”. This will depend on how your Organization SSO settings are configured. The administrator will select the appropriate Organization, and the appropriate account. Then, they will be able to select Channel, and see all of the channels they’ve been provided administrative access to.

Note: If you are the original owner of this Organization, you will need to log in with your IBMid to gain access.

Within your IBM Watson Media dashboard you can edit the start and end playback points for video files. This is sometimes called trimming the head and tail of the file. This can be useful if for example you want to cut out a long intro or ending that is part of the video recording but does not contain useful content.

Related topics

Managing videos in your account

How to upload videos to your account

Trim and edit video

As part of your account dashboard, you will find your video manager. This is where you manage all the videos you have recorded or uploaded.

Hover over a video in the list, use the drop down menu on the right side and choose "Trim video"

This will bring you to the Trim tab on the edit screen

Use the play button to preview the video and use the handles to set the in and out points of the video.

You can preview your edit by pressing play again.

Once you have set the in and out points where you want them, you can use either of the two buttons to save your edit.

Trim original video will save the in and out points to be used within the IBM player, but your full file will be preserved. Any views or metadata edits on the trimmed video will be shared with the parent video.

Save as new video will create a new file. This new file will have separate view counts and metadata than the original file. This new file can be downloaded, shared, or used in 3rd party players and the clip will start and end at the new points that were set in the tool with the remaining video information discarded.

ECDN historical usage reports

You can retrieve ECDN usage data for any duration in the past one year. You may submit your requests using REST APIs or via the web portal. All requests are handled asynchronously. Submissions are immediately acknowledged. Processing is queued up. When ready, you will get an email notification with a link to download the raw data file for the specified duration. Reports are available in CSV format.

Submit report requests via the web portal

Click on "REPORTS" in the page header to bring up the "Request report" page.

RFC3339

Steps:

Specify the data range for the duration of interest. You may enter custom values or select a preset from the dropdown. Default is "Today":

Specify the granularity of aggregating the usage data.

For date range duration of <= 24 hours, you may pick either Minute or Hour as the aggregation interval.

For date range duration > 24 hours, you can only pick Hour as the aggregation interval.

Specify whether you want data to be further aggregated by "Locations"(default), or you want to the data for all ECDN "Servers".

Specify "All metrics" (default) or pick specific ones from the dropdown:

Specify the email address to which the report should be sent when ready.

Click the "Request report" button to submit your request.

Your submission will be acknowledged and uniquely identified with a request id.

All report requests are processed asynchronously. When ready, and email will be sent to the specified address, which has a link to download the report. See below for example reports and how to interpret the data.

Submit report requests via REST API

This is a two step process:

Get an authentication token and store it in a cookie.

Submit request using the cookie for authentication.

This article has examples that use the command line tool curl to make the REST API calls. You may also use any other REST tool of your choice.

Authentication

The API uses session based authentication. To get a valid session, send a POST request to /login API giving your email, and password as input parameters. Note, these are the same credentials you use to login to the ECDN web portal.

$ curl -X POST -d 'email=yourEmailAddress&password=yourPassword'

-H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded"

https://api.deepcaching.com/login -c cookie.txt

{ "success": true }

Replace yourEmailAddress and yourPassword with your email address and password before making the call.

If successful, you will see {"success":true} response, and the API authentication token will be stored in the file cookie.txt in your local directory.

For the ECDN beta environment use the API endpoint: https://beta-api.deepcaching.com/login

Submit request

The report request can be submitted by making a POST request to the /reports API as shown below. This call will retrieve all usage metrics for all servers with minute level granularity for the duration between midnight to 4pm GMT on 16 April 2018.

Don't forget to include the cookie file for authentication. Sample response is also shown.

$ curl -X POST -d '{"start": "2018-04-16T00:00:00Z", "end":

"2018-04-16T16:00:00Z", "include": [], "outputFormat": "csv", "kind":

"servers", "granularity":"minute", "email": "yourEmailAddress"}'

https://api.deepcaching.com/reports -b cookie.txt

{ "reportID": "mr-fb34c3d12f9bf475c", "userID": 999,

"customerID": 9999, "start": "2018-04-16T00:00:00Z", "end":

"2018-04-16T16:00:00Z", "include": [], "kind": "servers",

"granularity":"minute", "outputFormat": "csv", "email": "yourEmailAddress",

"createdAt": "2018-04-16T19:53:04.365205705Z" }

The input parameters are:

Parameter name

Description

start

Start date and time in RFC3339 format. This represents the start time of the usage data interval that you are interested in. Examples:

"2018-05-18T08:00:00-07:00" - represents 8am 18 May 2018 in Pacific Time Zone during daylight savings time when the clocks are 7 hours behind GMT.

"2018-04-16T15:00:00Z" - represents 3pm 15 April 2018 GMT.

end

End date and time in format. This represents the end time of the usage data interval that you are interested in.

End time must be later than start time.

include

This represents the list of metrics that you are interested in. If empty [], then response will include all metrics.

Valid values are: "buffering", "playing", "savedBw", "rx", "tx".

To retrieve select metrics, specify a list such as ["rx", "tx",

"savedBw"]. See the example below for a description of each of these metrics.

outputFormat

Format in which the raw data will be returned.

Valid value:"csv".

Use "csv" for CSV (comma separated values) format, and use "json" for JSON format.

kind

This specifies whether you want usage data aggregated for every location, or for each individual ECDN server.

Valid values are: "locations", and "servers".

granularity

This specifies the aggregation unit.

Valid values are "minute" or "hour".

When duration of interest specified by "start" and "end" parameters is <= 24 hours, you may retrieve the data aggregated for every "minute" or for every "hour".

When duration exceeds 24 hours, the data is aggregated for every hour, and the only valid value is "hour".

email

This is the email address where the completion email will be sent after this request is processed. The email will contain the URL to download the file with the usage data.

As shown, the response contains the unique reportID assigned to this request.

Download the report

When processing of request is complete, you will receive an email with a link to file that has the usage data in it. You can click the Download report button to get the file.

This link to the report data file will be valid for 7 days. Beyond this time, you will have to submit a new request to get the usage data.

Example usage data in CSV format

The table below represents the usage data for an ECDN account that has one location Budapest, which has two ECDN server instances named server-001.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com, and server-002.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com.

Here's a description of what each metric represents:

timestamp

Time of the measurement in UTC.

hostname

Hostname of the server.

hostId

Host identifier.

locationName

Name of the server's location as seen in the ECDN web portal.

locationId

Location identifier

playingCount

The peak point-in-time number of viewers connected to this server in this aggregate interval.

For a "server" report, it represents the maximum of number of viewers connected to this specific server instance at any time during this time interval.

For a "locations" report it is the maximum of number of viewers across all servers configured in that location.

Note: ECDN servers cannot identify which employee watched the video stream by connecting to it. It only knows the IP address of machine that connected to it.

bufferingCount

The peak number of viewers who experiencing buffering at any given time during this time interval. See playingCount description above on what it represents.

rx

This represents the upstream WAN traffic ie amount of data received (video streams downloaded and cached) by the ECDN server(s).

The value represents the total bytes received in the given time interval (per-minute or per-hour).

rxUnit

Unit of the value in rx column. It is bytes.

tx

This represents the downstream LAN traffic ie the amount of data sent out from the ECDN server(s) to all the viewers.

The value represents the total bytes sent in the given time interval (per-minute or per-hour).

txUnit

Unit of the value in tx column. It is bytes.

savedBw

This is a derived metric whose value =tx - rx.

It represents the saved bandwidth in bytes in the given time interval.

An aggregate of all these values gives a measure of the amount of WAN bandwidth saved by deploying ECDN servers.

A positive value, seen during playback, represents that a video chunks were downloaded once over the WAN, and then distributed to all the viewers over the LAN, thereby saving WAN bandwidth.

A negative value usually seen when the ECDN servers are idle, and represents the network traffic due to ECDN servers uploading their metrics and health heartbeat status data.

Notes:

Even when there is no playback, there is still network activity in the ECDN server instance such as: heartbeat to ECDN backend, metrics upload, NTP, log forwarding, VPN traffic if remote assistance checkbox is enabled etc.

If there is lot of extraneous chatter on the local network, such as when multicast packets are flowing, the "rx" and "tx" values will be skewed, and not accurately represent the ECDN or streaming video traffic.

savedBwUnit

Unit of the value in savedBw column. It is bytes.

A report with kind = "servers":

For each server there is one row of data for each minute.

timestamp

hostname

hostId

locationName

locationId

playingCount

bufferingCount

rx

rxUnit

tx

txUnit

savedBW

savedBwUnit

2018-04-16T20:31:00Z

server-001.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

455

Budapest

17

0

0

2419

bytes

1602

bytes

-49020

bytes

2018-04-16T20:31:00Z

server-002.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

467

Budapest

17

0

0

2694

bytes

2339

bytes

-21300

bytes

2018-04-16T20:32:00Z

server-001.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

455

Budapest

17

0

0

2282

bytes

1530

bytes

-45120

bytes

2018-04-16T20:32:00Z

server-002.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

467

Budapest

17

2

0

165189

bytes

190873

bytes

1541040

bytes

2018-04-16T20:33:00Z

server-001.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

455

Budapest

17

0

0

2496

bytes

1624

bytes

-52320

bytes

2018-04-16T20:33:00Z

server-002.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

467

Budapest

17

2

0

435119

bytes

805249

bytes

22207800

bytes

2018-04-16T20:34:00Z

server-001.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

455

Budapest

17

0

0

1694

bytes

1277

bytes

-25020

bytes

2018-04-16T20:34:00Z

server-002.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

467

Budapest

17

2

0

433732

bytes

801739

bytes

22080420

bytes

2018-04-16T20:35:00Z

server-001.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

455

Budapest

17

0

0

2349

bytes

1549

bytes

-48000

bytes

2018-04-16T20:35:00Z

server-002.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

467

Budapest

17

2

0

433963

bytes

802286

bytes

22099380

bytes

2018-04-16T20:36:00Z

server-001.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

455

Budapest

17

0

0

2442

bytes

1607

bytes

-50100

bytes

2018-04-16T20:36:00Z

server-002.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

467

Budapest

17

2

0

432888

bytes

802216

bytes

22159680

bytes

2018-04-16T20:37:00Z

server-001.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

455

Budapest

17

0

0

2277

bytes

1516

bytes

-45660

bytes

2018-04-16T20:37:00Z

server-002.ecdn-demo.ecdn-ustream.com

467

Budapest

17

2

0

433578

bytes

802535

bytes

22137420

bytes

A report with kind = "locations":

For each location there is one row of data for each minute.

timestamp

locationName

locationId

playingCount

bufferingCount

rx

rxUnit

tx

txUnit

savedBW

savedBwUnit

2018-04-16T20:31:00Z

Budapest

17

0

0

7284

bytes

5278

bytes

-120360

bytes

2018-04-16T20:32:00Z

Budapest

17

2

0

170337

bytes

194037

bytes

1422000

bytes

2018-04-16T20:33:00Z

Budapest

17

2

0

440121

bytes

808363

bytes

22094520

bytes

2018-04-16T20:34:00Z

Budapest

17

2

0

438270

bytes

804624

bytes

21981240

bytes

2018-04-16T20:35:00Z

Budapest

17

2

0

438297

bytes

805072

bytes

22006500

bytes

2018-04-16T20:36:00Z

Budapest

17

2

0

438163

bytes

805453

bytes

22037400

bytes

2018-04-16T20:37:00Z

Budapest

17

2

0

438417

bytes

805576

bytes

22029540

bytes

Interpreting the data

How many viewers watched a broadcast via the ECDNs?

In the servers report take the maximum value of playingCountcolumn for each server, and add them up.

In the locations report, take the maximum value of playingCount column for each location, and add them up.

Note: This sum is an approximation, as the peak viewership as seen in the server/locations data may not have happened at the same exact time.

How many viewers experienced buffering during the broadcast?

Similar to the previous calculation, in the servers report, take the maximum value of the bufferingCount column for each server, and add them up.

In the locations report, take the maximum value of the bufferingCount column for each location, and add them up.

Note: A sustained high value (> 5\% of viewership) of bufferingCount usually warrants an investigation. It is not unusual for each site to report some buffering during a broadcast.

On buffering, the IBM Watson Media Video player is designed to auto-switch to a lower resolution (bitrate) to provide the best viewing experience. The player can also auto-switch to a higher resolution video, if it detects a higher quality stream is available, and the WAN network has sufficient available bandwidth capacity to deliver this higher bitrate stream.

Viewers from how many locations experienced buffing during the broadcast?

In the locations report, identify all locations with non-zero values in the bufferingCount column. sort |

uniq the data to remove duplicates.

Similarly, in the servers report, identify all servers with non-zero values in the bufferingCount column, and then sort

| uniq the results. Next further process to eliminate the duplicate locationName values to get the answer.

How much WAN bandwidth was saved by using ECDNs?

Total the savedBw column values in either of the locations or servers report. The sum, in bytes, is the amount of network traffic over the WAN that was avoided by using ECDNs in distributing the video stream data to all the viewers.

If ever you want to create a Pay-per-view event, we recommend you use Cleeng: a scalable and agile PPV solution.

Cleeng allows you to create an online event to reach your global fanbase with PPV, manage subscriptions, video rentals and powerful metrics reporting. There is no software to download! Just choose a plan and start selling within seconds. It's completely free to create an event!

There is no software to download and you can start selling within seconds. It's completely free to create your first event! You can then sell it from Cleeng hosted pre-booking page or embed it on your own website.

Cleeng provides you with a range of templates for your event pre-booking page - if you would like to see a sample, please see the following example here.

In order for your broadcast to only be accessed by your Cleeng URL, you must hide your channel from being seen on video.ibm.com.

From the IBM Watson Media side you will need to

Hide Your Channel

Set Embed Restrictions

Hide Share Button

Copy Embed Code

To get started and create your first event visit: https://cleeng.com

If you have additional questions regarding support in Cleeng, please see the link to their Knowledge Base: https://support.cleeng.com/hc/en-us.

IBM Watson Media Video Streaming andEnterprise Video Streamingplayers are officially supported on the currently available last 2 major releases of major browsers. You can access the full list by clicking here.

For the best viewing experience, we recommend viewing IBM Watson Media Video Streaming and Enterprise Video Streaming content on up-to-date browsers. Go here to get the latest version of Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

(Note: Viewing IBM Watson Media content on outdated browser versions may lead to inconsistent or unexpected behavior)

Slide upload and viewing Introduction

Slide upload is a new feature that allows uploading and sharing slides with viewers in parallel with the streaming video content.

Upload slides on Dashboard

On the Dashboard, go to Interactivitysection of your channel to access the Slides feature.

Click,Manage slide decks

Next, selectAdd slide deck. PDF files can be uploaded to support all presentation software (Powerpoint etc.)

Here you may chooseChoose a file, give it a title and click the Add button.

Broadcast slidesFrom within Remote Console (for any 3rd-party encoder)

To access the Remote Console for your channel, go to Dashboard, select your channel and scroll down to Broadcast Settings and select Encoder settings. From here you can Launch the remote console.

Broadcast slidesFrom the Web Broadcaster

You may also manage your slides from the Web Broadcaster by selecting the Go LIVE button in the top right corner of your Dashboard. Once the Web broadcaster is open, select the Menu button and choose Slides.

Viewing slides as a viewer

Once you have managed and started streaming your slides. Viewers will see the Slides appear automatically.

Viewers will also have options on how they want to view your content and slides and can have the ability to toggle how they are displayed.

Viewers can have the ability to watch either a Picture in Picture (PiP)of your content and slides together or can decide on which one they would prefer to watch in full screen on player.

Video on Demand (VOD) Recording live slides

Please note If a recording is in progress when the live content with slides is being presented, the slides will be recorded with the VOD and played back when watching the VOD.

VOD - Slide index

In this case a slide index is also available when watching the VOD to seek to any specific slide in the video.

Getting started on IBM Watson Media is easy! In order to broadcast, you first need to create an account.

In order to create a account:

Click on the 'SIGN UP' button in the upper right corner.

help center home page

This will take you to our pricing page. To sign up for one of our Pro Broadcasting plans, click on 'VIEW PRO PLANS' and select either a Silver, Gold, or Platinum Level account. You can sign up immediately for free, however, by selecting 'START FREE TRIAL'. The free trial lasts for 30 days, after which you can sign up for a Pro Broadcasting account or continue as a free user.

After selecting your plan type, you will be directed to the signup page. Here, you can enter your first and last name, the email address you wish to be associated with your IBM Watson Media account (you will log in with this email address), and the password for your account. Please note that by signing up for IBM Watson Media, you are agreeing to our terms of service and our privacy policy.

After creating your account, you'll want to check the email you used in creating the account for a verification link. This is to make sure that your email is really being used by you.

Open the email, and click on the button to start your free trial!

At this point, you can choose to go live immediately, check out the video manager, or just look around your account. You can find specific instructions on creating your first channel and broadcasting from our web broadcaster in this help center, or search lots of other topics from our .

Phone Support

If you are on an active subscription plan you will see the Customer Support phone number in your account dashboard. Phone support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can access your account by going here and logging in with your username: here.

Email Support

Email support is available to Pro Broadcasters, Free trial Broadcasters and Viewers. You can file an email support ticket here: Support Ticket Form. Please provide us with as much information as you can within the support form. The more information we have, the better we can support you.

Knowledge Base

For FAQ's, Videos, and support articles please visit our Help Center. You can also find a series of helpful videos on different streaming topics here.

There may be a few reasons why your IBM Watson Media purchase was not accepted.

The card you have on file is being declined by your bank. We recommend you contact your bank to see if your account has insufficient funds, or if there is a hold on your card.

You are trying to make a purchase from a blocked country: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Nigeria

You currently have an outstanding balance on your account. To see how to pay your outstanding balance, please see the following article: Why isn't my payment going through?

There are 5 elements to any streaming production setup.

Camera or video signal

Microphone or audio signal

Video capture or conversion

Encoding

Internet connection

Some streaming options combine some or all of these elements into a single device. For example if you use a mobile phone for streaming, your phone has all 5 elements built-in. For more advanced streaming setups, you may need to combine various pieces of hardware and software to meet your needs.

Streaming configurations

Basic

All streaming elements integrated into a single device, like a mobile phone or a laptop.

Advanced

Separate elements are used for increased flexibility and specialization in the video production and streaming workflow.

1. Camera or video signal

See recommended internet and encoding settings

The beginning of any live stream is capturing a video image. This can be done with a simple camera, such as the built-in one on your mobile phone or laptop, with a professional video camera, or with the output signal of a video switcher.

Video source

Basic

Built-in camera on your phone or computer, or a USB camera like the Logitech C920

Advanced

Analog, HDMI or SDI cameras, or the output of a video switcher, going into a video capture interface.

2. Microphone or audio signal

Learn how to configure and troubleshoot audio for your Broadcast

Capturing clean sound and broadcasting it at the right level is essential for any broadcast. Your mobile device or computer has a built in mic that works if you're capturing something right in front of you, but typically you'll want to use external microphones placed as close to your presenter as possible, or get a feed directly from the PA system soundboard. There are a couple ways to do this. You can input audio directly to your camera and this audio gets embedded with the video signal and fed into the encoder. Or you can input audio to your encoder via your computer's audio inputs, audio inputs on a capture card, or a USB audio interface.

Audio source

Basic

Built-in microphone on your camera, mobile device, or computer.

Advanced

External microphones, routed into an audio mixer and fed into the camera, computer, or a hardware encoder.

3. Capture or conversion

See recommended capture cards

If you're using a professional camera or video feed from a switcher and you're using encoding software on a computer rather than dedicated encoding hardware, you may need to add a capture box or card to digitize and convert the video signal so it can be recognized by the encoding software on your computer. If you're using the built-in camera on your mobile device or computer, a USB camera, or a dedicated hardware encoder, you won't need any additional capture device.

Capture

Basic

If you're using a built-in camera or a USB camera, you won't need any capture device.

Advanced

When you're using professional cameras, you'll need to either buy an encoder that has a built-in capture interface, or add capture cards or boxes to your computer.

4. Encoding

The purpose of an encoder is to take a video signal and compress it into the correct format to stream across your internet connection and send it to IBM Watson Media's servers. In many streaming setups, the encoder is integrated with the broadcasting or switching software. For example, IBM Watson Media's Web Broadcaster have a built in encoding, so no separate encoder is required. In professional video setups it's common to have a dedicated piece of software or hardware that does only encoding and separate hardware and software is used for capture and switching.

5. Internet Connection

A solid internet connection is one of the most important aspects of being able to stream live. Without a good internet connection, you won't be able to stream at all.

Before streaming, you should always test your current upload bandwidth

Once you conduct your speedtest, you want to look at what the *upload* speed is and set your encoder's bitrate based on that. You never want to be using more than 50\% of your available bandwidth.

A low quality stream can be done on as little as 600-800kbps upload speed.

For a medium quality stream, a minimum of 1.5Mbps upload bandwidth is required.

For higher quality and HD streams you'll want 4Mbps or greater upload speed.

If you are using the IBM Watson Media's Web Broadcaster or mobile app and you have a strong internet connection, you might not need to worry about changing any encoding settings. If you are using a 3rd party encoding device or want to increase your quality, you will want to test your bandwidth and learn how to set an appropriate bitrate for your stream to maximize your quality and ensure an uninterrupted high quality stream.

Internet

Basic

4G, WiFi, or whatever connection you can find.

Advanced

Ethernet connection with dedicated bandwidth.

The IBM Watson Media platform supports RTMP ingest and is designed to work with industry-leading third party encoders. Not all RTMP capable encoders will work with IBM Watson Media, so it is strongly recommended to use one of the certified encoders listed below to have maximum quality and reliability for your stream on IBM Watson Media.

NewTek TriCaster

Cisco AnyRes Live 8300 Data Sheet

The NewTek TriCaster is the world's leading all-in-one, integrated live production system. Connect multiple cameras and audio and add graphics, video playback, titles and more. Multiple simultaneous outputs let you project, record, and stream.

Learn more about NewTek TriCaster

Compatible cameras

Component / composite analog sources

HDMI Cameras

SDI Cameras

More info

Streaming from the NewTek TriCaster

Teradek

The Teradek VidiU is a portable HD h.264 / AAC encoder with HDMI input and capability to stream at resolutions up to 1080p. Broadcast over ethernet or WiFi, or connect an optional 4G USB adapter, use the internal battery and camera mount for truly portable streaming.

Learn more about Teradek products

Compatible cameras

HDMI Cameras

SDI Cameras (Cube only)

Matrox Monarch H.264 encoders

Matrox Monarch H.264 encoders are simple-to-use streaming and recording appliances that can easily capture HDMI or SDI camera signals. Equipped with up to two powerful encoding engines, the Monarch LCS, Monarch HDX, and Monarch HD appliance provide independently encoded streams, each at bitrates customizable to your unique needs. The Monarch HDX offers stream-embedded closed captioning, enabling IBM Watson Media users to provide fully accessible video by simply adding the HDX to their existing production workflows.

Learn more about Matrox Monarch Streaming and Recording Appliances

Compatible cameras

HDMI Cameras

SDI Cameras

Elemental Live encoders

Elemental Live is a video processing system that merges the benefits of massively parallel hardware with the flexibility and forward compatibility of intelligent software. Elemental Live executes simultaneous processing and encoding of multiple adaptive bit rate outputs, delivering the high-quality, high-efficiency performance required for streaming live video. A single Elemental Live system can perform the work of more than four CPU-only encoders.

Learn more about Elemental Technologies

Compatible cameras

SDI Cameras

More info

Broadcasting to from an Elemental Live Encoder

Harmonic

Harmonic is the industry's leading provider of encoding, stream processing and video networking solutions for superior-quality broadcast and multiscreen applications.

Learn more about Harmonic

Wowza Media Systems

Wowza software and services let you capture and stream live events directly from any encoder or IP camera. Share your live stream with your viewers or archive it for later viewing.

Learn more about Wowza Media Systems

Other RTMP encoders

Almost any RTMP encoder should work with IBM Watson Media.Additional encoders and documentation are provided as is below, though.

Brand

Model

Type

More Info

Telestream

Wirecast

Software

Streaming with Wirecast

Adobe

Flash Media Live Encoder

Software

Streaming with Adobe FMLE

Cisco

Cisco AnyRes Live

Hardware

When streaming to IBM Watson Media, you can send either a single bitrate or multiple bitrate streams to your IBM Watson Media channel ingest point.

What is video quality of experience (QoE)?

To engage and retain their audiences, Internet video broadcasters must deliver the best possible video Quality of Experience to their viewers. An enjoyable video viewing experience is only obtained when the sharpest possible video quality is delivered continuously to the player without experiencing playback interruptions. Studies show that despite high picture quality, viewers most typically abandon video sessions if frequent playback interruptions are experienced.

Since high video quality is achieved with a combination of higher resolutions and frame rates, encoding higher quality video (e.g. HD) yields higher bitrates, for a real-time data stream that must be delivered to the player on time. Considering that network bandwidth fluctuates during a video session, a tradeoff between video quality and smooth playback must be made. High QoE streaming is always achieved by dynamically striking a balance between these factors.

In summary, to deliver engaging video QoE, smooth streaming is as important as video quality, presenting a tradeoff that must be adjusted dynamically during a video session.

Why are multiple bitrates important?

Having a multi-bitrate representation of the video content in each video session enables the use of Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming technology to dynamically address the quality tradeoff and maximize viewer’s QoE during the video session. To do that, ABR players constantly measure available network bandwidth and dynamically adjust video bitrate to match it. This is done by seamlessly switching among the video bitrates in the representation without interruptions.

The IBM Watson Media player maximizes QoE, ensuring that viewers get the maximum video quality attainable at any moment with smooth playback, avoiding pauses or re-buffering events.

The advantages of ABR in the IBM Watson Media player can be clearly visualized by analyzing the dynamics of the opposite case: a single bitrate video session. While some viewers might be on fast connections and are able to watch an HD stream, other viewers will be on slower connections and the live stream or recorded video will pause (rebuffer) frequently for them. When sending only a single bitrate stream, a solution to this is to send a medium-quality stream so that both groups of viewers can watch a stream that is of acceptable quality, but not so high as to cause buffering. The downside of this approach is that the viewers on fast connections aren't getting the best quality, and the viewers on slow connections might still experience some buffering. With multiple bitrate streaming, you don't need to make this compromise and you instead send multiple quality streams so each viewer can watch a stream optimized for their bandwidth. For example, someone on a fast internet connection can view an HD-quality stream while someone on a slower connection can view a lower quality stream without buffering, and someone with a medium-quality connection can view a medium-quality stream. QoE is therefore maximized for each viewer at any given moment.

IBM Watson Media Live Transcoding

While it is preferable to stream in multiple bitrates from the source, one challenge of multiple bitrate streaming is you need to have a powerful processor to encode multiple streams in parallel, and ample bandwidth to send multiple streams in parallel. In many situations, both the processing power available and the bandwidth available is limited, so encoding and sending multiple streams from the source of the video signal is not practical. This is why we developed the Transcoding service in IBM Watson Media. IBM Watson Media's Transcoding service provides the benefits of multiple bitrate streaming but only require a single stream ingest. You can send a single high resolution stream, but your viewers can receive multiple streams optimized for their connections.

When utilizing IBM Live Transcoding, you send a single high resolution stream that meets the required encoding specifications and it is re-encoded into following lower bitrate / resolution streams. Please see our article with encoding specifications for the required input format.

Quality

Resolution

Video Bitrate

Audio Bitrate

Audio Sample Rate

Frames Per Second

Video Codec

h.264 Profile

Keyframe interval

Audio Codec

Audio Channels

HD 1080

1920x1080

3,000 kbps

192 kbps

48 kHz

25/30/60

h.264

Main or High

1 Second

AAC-LC

Stereo

HD 720

1280x720

1,500 kbps

192 kbps

48 kHz

25/30/60

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stero

480p

854x480

1,000 kbps

128 kbps

48 kHz

25/30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

360p

640x360

750 kbps

128 kbps

48 kHz

25/30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

240p

426x240

500 kbps

128 kbps

48 kHz

25/30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono

64k

426x240

200 kbps

56 kbps

48 kHz

6

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono

Accessing Transcoding Settings:

log in to your account then

go to the channel settings tab for the channel you wish to enable.

Choose Broadcast settings

then Multi-quality streaming settings. You will see a list of checks that allow you to set what versions of your streams you wish to have transcoded. Options will vary according to your plan and ingest stream quality. A1080p ingest example follows:

Multiple bitrates from external encoders (local transcoding)

Some encoders will allow you to send up to 4 bitrates from your encoder and these will be passed through to the player as you send them. If you have sufficient encoder processing power and bandwidth, this can be used as an alternative to using IBM Watson Media Live Transcoding. When sending multiple bitrates to the player, the stream bitrates will display in place of the resolution when the streams share the same resolution. Please check the manual for your specific encoder to determine how this can be done.

Deleting your channel is very easy. Please note that by deleting your channel you will also delete all videos that are on that channel. If you wish to keep your videos, you can download them to your computer and then delete the channel.

First, log in to your IBM Watson Media account. From the Dashboard Click on Channel and select the name channel your wish to delete

Click on the info tab of the channel you have selected to delete, and scroll all the way down and click on "Delete Channel". Here you will be required to enter the Password to your Pro Broadcasting account OR Re-enter the name of the channel for Video Streaming or Video Streaming for Enterprise accounts.

click here.

If you wish to know how to delete your entire account, please

You can add videos to your IBM Watson Media accountby recording your live broadcasts, or by uploading previously recorded content using IBM Watson Media upload tools. This article describes the different upload capabilities offered by IBM Watson Media.

Video upload capabilities

Upload in your browser

Browser-based video upload for admins (via the Dashboard)

Browser-based video upload for viewers (user-generated content coming soon)

Aspera-accelerated browser-based video upload for admins

Upload through the API

Upload files and metadata using the Channel API

Upload using professional services

Video file and metadata import from other platforms (eg. Amazon S3 storage)

Video file and metadata import from hard drive

Please contact your account representative to learn more about professional services.

Video file formats

Supported formats and file types

Container: mkv, mp4, mov, flv, avi, wmv,mpeg2

Video codec: h264, h263, mpeg4 (and variants), vp6, vp8, theora, wmv

Audio codec: mp3, aac-lc, nellymoser, pcm (16 bit max), speex, vorbis, wma

Specifications

Requirements

Max file size: 4 GB

Minimum length: 4 sec

Minimum bitrate: 64 kbps

Recommendations

Video Codec: h.264

Audio Codec: AAC-LC

Quality

Resolution

Video Bitrate

Audio Bitrate

Audio Sample Rate

Frames Per Sec

Video Codec

h.264 Profile

Key Frame Interval

Audio Codec

Audio Channels

Low

480x270

400 kbps

64kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Baseline

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono

Med

640x360

400-800 kbps

96kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

High

960x540/

854X480

800 - 1500 kbps

96kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

HD 720

1280x720

1,500 - 4,000 kbps

128kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Main

1 Second

AAC-LC

Mono or Stereo

HD

1080

1920x1080

4,000 - 8,000 kbps

192kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

Main or High

1 Second

AAC-LC

Stereo

4K

3840X2160

8,000 - 25,000 kbps

192kbps

48kHz

25 / 30

h.264

High

1 Second

AAC-LC

Stereo

Details: Browser-based video upload for admins

From the dashboard, click the upload button in the top right of your screen.

Select the channel you wish to associate this video with.

Click Videos to go to the video management page. You'll see the Upload button and also be able to browse any previously recorded or uploaded videos for this channel.

Before the upload starts, you need to enter some details for each video. Name is the title that will display in the video list and above the player during playback on the channel page. You also need to enter a Description, although this can be the same as the Name field. Note that you can change this information later. When details for all videos are complete, click Upload to start the import process.

Upload time depends upon the speed of your internet connection, and you track progress by watching the progress bar for each video. Video files can be large, so allow some time for this process to complete and do not navigate away from the page while uploading is underway (this will cancel the upload). http://yourdomain.com/video_file.mp4

After upload completes, videos may need to be re-encoded to ensure they can playback successfully on all devices. For shorter videos, this happens almost instantly. Longer videos are placed in an encoding processing queue on IBM Watson Media's servers, and you can check progress for this step below your video upload. (Note that you can see any files which could not be encoded here also. Files with bad data, or an incompatible format will show up here with error as their status.)

You are free to start uploading additional videos while encoding is underway. When complete, your videos will appear in the Videos tab. By default, the most recently uploaded or recorded videos appear first in the list, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically. From within the Videos tab you can preview them, edit their details, make them private or public, share them to YouTube or re-download and delete them.

Click on a video thumbnail to start playback from your channel page. Your browser will navigate to the channel page and start to play (videos need to be marked public for this to work.) The URL shown in your browser gives the link you can share with others to let them watch this content on your channel page.

For larger files and faster uploads, please see the instructions for Aspera accelerated video upload.

Details: XML Mass Video File Transfer

The IBM Watson Media XML video upload tool allows you to transfer large video libraries to your IBM Watson Media channel.

Requirements

Videos must be hosted on a server where they can be accessed via HTTP or FTP links without any redirects or authentication.

Links entered in the XML file must end with a valid video file extension, such as .mkv, .mp4, .mov, .flv, .avi, .wmv, etc.

The XML video upload tool does not allow for transfer via authenticated FTP or any other method that requires logging in.

Your XML file should be sure to contain this header: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Your <tag> section should contain no spaces.

How to use the XML video upload tool

The XML file must be created in the following format

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<videos>

<video>

<channelId>YOUR_CHANNEL_ID_HERE</channelId>

<title>THISISTHEVIDEOTITLE</title>

<description>THISISTHEVIDEODESCRIPTION</description>

<tags>

<tag>THISISAVIDEOTAG</tag>

</tags>

<url></url>

</video>

</videos>

Once the XML file is created, host it on your own server.

In your dashboard, navigate to the XML video upload tool.

Enter the URL of where the .xml file is hosted.

Hit OK

The tool will first import and read the xml file, then it will begin importing the videos. The status of the video imports can be viewed on the same screen. The importing is done between the servers, you can navigate away from this page with no effect on the import.

To deploy an ECDN server instance, the following files are required:

Virtual appliance image that will be imported into the hypervisor. Supported hypervisors: VMware ESXi (OVA file), Microsoft Hyper-V (VHDX file), Oracle VM VirtualBox (OVA file).

Virtual CD (ISO file) containing the configuration settings for a particular ECDN server instance.

Virtual appliance image for ECDN server

You can download the latest version of the virtual appliance image for your hypervisor on the Supports & downloads page of your ECDN Management Portal.

Virtual CD with configuration settings

The virtual CD (ISO file) with the configuration settings is unique to each ECDN server instance and is only available as a result of the configuration process.

When you configure a new ECDN server or change the configuration of an existing one, you will be able to download the required files in the last step of the process.

A dialog will appear with links to the following files:

The virtual CD (ISO file) containing the configuration settings for that particular ECDN server instance

Virtual appliance image (or VM image) for your selected hypervisor

To access the virtual CD (ISO file) later, restart the configuration process by clicking the Change configuration link on the detailed view of the ECDN server.

Note: You may complete the configuration and generate the virtual CD again without making any changes to the configuration.

ECDN, or Enterprise Content Delivery Network, is a service of IBM Watson Media. It helps you to relieve network bottlenecks associated with delivering video content to locations, such as corporate offices, where you have a high number of concurrent viewers watching the same content, such as a live broadcast.

Content delivery on corporate networks

ECDN, or Enterprise Content Delivery Network, is a service of IBM Watson Media. It helps you to relieve network bottlenecks associated with delivery security-enhanced video to locations, such as corporate offices, where you have a high number of concurrent viewers watching the same video content, such as a live broadcast.

Traditional content delivery

Without ECDN, each viewer downloads the same stream from external CDN that overloads the ISP links, while corporate network resources are also stressed serving the video traffic (see figure below).

The problems:

Increased WAN bandwidth Every single viewer has a connection to the content origin server from where they download the video content. This dictates how large of an Internet pipe you need to buy from your Internet Service Provider, which is quite expensive.

Overloaded firewall For security reasons, all traffic from the Internet goes through the corporate firewall. While watching a live event, all viewer connections are downloading the same bytes, and each of them is being inspected. This requires you to buy a bigger firewall device increasing costs again.

The ECDN solution

ECDN servers deployed inside your corporate firewalls can help you reduce the amount of network resources needed to serve the same amount of traffic.

Only the adaptive bitrate stream is downloaded through the ISP link. End-users connect to the local ECDN server (see figure below).

With ECDN, you only need to download the video content from the origin server once for each ECDN server instance. All viewers get the content from the ECDN edge servers over the LAN. This significantly reduces the required WAN bandwidth.

The load on the firewall is also reduced, as it now has to inspect far less network packets as they come in from the Internet.

Viewers also benefit from the low network latency to the ECDN edges over the LAN.

See benefits of an ECDN solution in details in the following section.

The benefits of ECDN

Reduced WAN traffic for corporate locations ECDN caches the video content and then delivers it to other end-users viewing from the same location, over the local area network. Only a single copy for each transcoded version of the video content is downloaded from upstream remote source servers. This helps you significantly reduce your WAN traffic.

Better viewing experience at scale Viewers from a location where ECDN edge servers are deployed within the corporate network, will benefit from fast access to the local ECDN server instance.

Lower costs With ECDN, you don’t have to pay to have high capacity network connections to the Internet for each location.

Increased security All ECDN servers are deployed behind your corporate firewalls.

There are no inbound connections from Internet to the ECDN servers. By design, all network communication to the ECDN backend services originate from the ECDN servers.

Most viewers connect to ECDN edge servers on the LAN behind your corporate firewalls. This reduces the number of connections to the Internet.

All traffic flows over encrypted HTTPS protocols.

Ease of deployment ECDN servers are virtual appliances that can be installed on shared or dedicated hardware. We provide images for VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VM VirtualBox hypervisors.

Enhanced control and simplified operations You install all ECDN servers and you can reconfigure them at any time. With the web-based ECDN Management Portal, you get an easy to use interface to define your ECDN topology in terms of locations and number of server instances at each location.

Performance monitoring You can see the viewership on each ECDN server instance, and monitor performance across the network.

Automated software updates Updates for all ECDN components (including virtual appliances for servers) are delivered automatically.

Customer support As an IBM Watson Media ECDN customer, you have access to our phone support.

Basic concepts of ECDN

The ECDN service has three components:

ECDN Management Portal

ECDN edge server instance(s)

ECDN backend services

Another important concept of the ECDN service is that server instances are deployed at your “locations”. Locations represent physical or logical segments of your corporate network.

ECDN Management Portal

The web-based ECDN Management Portal lets you administer your ECDN deployments, and monitor the performance of the ECDN server instances.

When you become an ECDN customer, you will get access to the ECDN Management Portal that runs in IBM Watson Media.

ECDN edge server instance

ECDN server is a proxy cache server server running in your corporate network behind your firewall that downloads and caches the video stream contents. It then acts as the content origin for the video player clients in that location. You may have one or more ECDN server instances.

An ECDN server may be also referred to as “ECDN edge” or just “edge” if end-users can connect to the instance.

Each ECDN server is an instance of the ECDN virtual appliance image. An ECDN server belongs to a location, and acts as a local cache for that location. Every ECDN server instance requires only outbound network connectivity to the Internet. There is no inbound connections from the Internet to the ECDN servers.

ECDN backend services

ECDN backend services refers to a collection of web based services running in IBM Watson Media, that are used in the delivery of the ECDN service. These services include:

Collecting health check updates from ECDN servers

Collecting performance metrics

Providing configuration updates and release upgrades

Only the ECDN edges interact with ECDN backend services. You as ECDN customers don’t interact with ECDN backend services. For ease of communication, we sometimes refer to these as backend services end-points.

Locations

In the ECDN service, a “location” represents the designated data center name assigned to the physical office or building. ECDN servers are then assigned to this location.

Each location is given a set of external IP address ranges. Any traffic that originates from this location towards the Internet, appears to be coming from one of the external IP addresses assigned to that location.

When a playback request is received from a viewer with a certain external IP address, the ECDN service use the location settings to define to which server the player will connect to download the video stream.

The ECDN backend service sees the playback request as originating from a location that has this external IP address assigned to it.

The backend service sends an unordered list of available ECDN edges back to the player.

The player selects and connects to the server with the fastest response time (at the moment of the measurement) to download the video stream content.

Create a new ECDN server

You can start creating a new ECDN server by clicking the Add new server button on the list of servers. It will display the page with the configuration steps.

Step 1 Set location

Setting the Location of the edge, will assign the external IPs and prefixes that belong to the selected location.

Step 2 Set domain name

Start setting the unique domain name of your edge server by selecting the naming method.

The "Custom hostname" option will offer you a randomly generated hostname. You can edit it here if you wish to apply your own naming conventions.

For example, if you enter yourcity-01 as your hostname, the fully qualified domain name of your machine will be: yourcity-01.company-name.deepcaching.net, where “company-name” is a unique string for your organization.

The "Fully qualified domain name" option will let you choose the hostname along with the domain name.

For example: yourcity-01.your.custom.domain.com

Step 3 Enter configuration values

At first, select the IP address configuration method (manual or DHCP).

If you have selected the “Static (manual)!” configuration method, enter the required data:

The local IP address of the edge. (1)

The DNS mask (netmask) of the edge. (2)

The private gateway address of the edge. (3)

Note: Local IP, Netmask and Gateway can only be set for the manual IP address configuration method.

List your domain name servers (optional for DHCP). (4)

Note: If not specified, the default domain name server configured in the OS will be used.

Add your own NTP servers (optional). (5)

Note: NTP time servers are used for validating certificates and encrypted content. If not specified, the default NTP server configured in the OS will be used. Make sure the clock on the server is always accurate.

You can enable Log forwarding by selecting the protocol and entering the server address. (6)

Note: Any log collection system that supports syslog-style log streams is supported.

You can enable SNMP polling, by entering the v2c community string. (7)

When Remote assistance is enabled, the edge server establishes a secure VPN connection to ECDN backend service endpoint, and enables the ECDN support team to remotely log in to the edge server instance and help with troubleshooting. (8)

Step 4 Download the virtual CD and the VM image

The virtual CD image includes the configuration file for deployment. This image will be generated in the final step, then you can download it (along with the VM image for the selected server type).

Select the format for your server type.

Click Generate to create the virtual CD with the configuration file.

Click Download virtual CD (1), then follow the instructions appearing on your screen to install the virtual machine. You can also download the latest version of the VM image here. (2)

Change configuration of an edge server

To change the configuration of an existing edge server, open the detailed view of the server, and click the Change configuration link.

This will open the page where (similarly to creating a new edge server) you can change the configuration in 4 steps.

When completing the setup, your default (and recommended) option is to update remotely (1). You can review the highlighted pending changes on the right column on this page (2).

A multi-tier structure of locations will define upstream and downstream servers in your corporate network.

Locations without a parent are the so called top-tier locations. Their servers connect to the midgress servers of the IBM Watson Media CDN.

When you set a location as a parent for other locations, the servers of this parent location will become the upstream servers for the child locations. Instead of downloading content from the IBM Watson Media CDN midgress servers, they will request it from another ECDN server within the corporate network.

Rules of the multi-tier architecture

Important rules of the multi-tier architecture in IBM Watson Media ECDN:

A location can have only one parent, but can have multiple children.

Maximum 3 tiers are supported.

The configuration flows of the ECDN Management Portal support the rules by preventing you from making changes that would conflict with them. (e.g. You won’t be able to create a parent-child relationship that would result in more than 3 tiers.)

Define parent-child relationships

There are various methods to define parent-child relationships. It will depend on your workflow which one you will prefer.

You can set the parent when you edit details of a new or an existing location.

In the location list, you can add a child to a location.

In the location list, you can set the same parent for multiple locations at once.

Set parent for a new location

Create a new location from scratch by selecting the Add new location button at the location list.

In this scenario, you will set the parent location on the Add new location page.

Choose the option of “Selected location” (1) on the Set parent dialog and select a location from the list (2).

When you have selected the parent, its external IP addresses and prefixes will be inherited by default (1).

Note: inherited values can’t be edited. (2)

You can also choose the option to set a custom value (3). The field of external IP addresses will be cleared and you can enter a new value (4) (or copy from another location).

Set new parent for existing location

You can change the parent for existing locations on their Edit location screen.

It is similar to setting a parent to a new location, except the followings:

When you set the new parent, it will keep previous custom external IP address values by default. However, you can still change it (enter new custom values or select “Inherit values from parent”).

Clicking the Save button will take you to the Confirm location updates page where you need to review the changes and confirm the update.

Add a child to a location

At the list of locations, you can easily add a new location as a child of an existing one. Click the “+” icon that appears when you move your cursor over the selected location in the list.

This will open the Add new location page where the above selected location will be already set as parent.

Set parent for multiple locations

When you select one or more locations in the list of locations, the Set parent button will be enabled and you can start the process of changing their parent at once.

All selected locations will be moved to the same level, regardless their previous role in the hierarchy.

If the selected locations have children and you intend to keep their relations to their original parent, make sure that you haven’t marked them to get the new parent.

The Set new parent dialog will open, where you can select the new parent.

Choose the option “Selected location”.

Select a location.

Clicking the Review changes button will take you to the Confirm location updates page.

Confirm location updates

Changing parent-child relations will assign new upstream servers to the servers at the involved locations. This step in the process will let you review the changes before you commit to configure the servers remotely.

The changes will take effect after you confirm the updates.

For this installation the OVA package and the virtual CD image are required.

Prepare for deployment on VMware vCenter

When deploying your ECDN server, you need to have the virtual CD image in the datastore. This is where you will load it from, before powering on the machine.

After opening the VSphere web client and connecting to your host environment, select Storage (on Home tab or in the Navigator).

Under Storage, right click on the datastore of your host to open the contextual menu, and select Browse Files to locate and upload the .iso file.

Wait until the image file is uploaded to the datastore. Then you can proceed with deploying your virtual machine.

Install the virtual machine on VMware vCenter

Deploy OVF template

Select Host and Clusters (on Home tab or in the Navigator).

Under Hosts and Clusters, right click on your ESXi host to open the contextual menu, and select Deploy OVF Template.

Select source file location of ECDN server OVA. For example, we are using a local file source. Click Next when finished.

Review import details. You can give a description to the machine if needed. Click Next to proceed.

Name the virtual machine and choose datacenter to deploy to. Click Next to proceed.

Note: The name of a virtual machine must be unique in a datacenter.

Select the storage to store the files for the deployed template.

Select “Thick Provision...” for virtual disk format, this is mandatory for performance.

Choose which network the instance should be added to and click Next.

Note: Later further interfaces can be added.

Make sure Power on after deployment is not selected, and click Finish.

Launch the virtual machine

Select Edit Settings from the context menu of the imported virtual machine.

Load the virtual CD image that you have uploaded to the datastore.

Set “Datastore ISO file” for CD/DVD drive 1 (1) and select the .iso image on your datastore.

Make sure that the Connect At Power On (2) is selected, then click OK.

Select Power > Power On from the context menu of the imported virtual machine.

Change the default password on the virtual machine

Launch the Console of the virtual machine.

When requested, use default user and the default password to log in.

Change the password by following the required steps appearing on the screen.

Please note, that the machine is completely functional even without the password change, however, for security reasons it is highly recommended to change the password.

Congratulations. You have successfully installed and launched the virtual machine on VMware vCenter.

For this installation the OVF and VMDK files and the virtual CD image (with the configuration file) are required.

Note: In this example, we are using the web interface.

Prepare for deployment on VMware ESXi

When deploying your edge server, you need to have the virtual CD image in the datastore. This is where you will load it from, before powering on the machine.

After opening the ESXi web client and connecting to your host environment, right-click on Storage in the Navigator, and select Browse datastores in this contextual menu.

Select datastore as location in the Datastore browser, and click Upload to select and upload the .iso file. (the virtual CD image).

Wait until the image file is uploaded to the datastore. Then you can proceed with deploying your virtual machine.

Install the virtual machine on VMware ESXi

Create a new virtual machine

Start installing your virtual machine by clicking Create/Register VM.

Choose "Deploy a virtual machine from an OVF or OVA file" and click Next.

Enter a name for the virtual machine, then drag and drop the OVF and VMDK files you received from IBM Watson Media to the appropriate area on the screen.

Once the files have appeared in the appropriate area, click Next.

Select a datastore where you would like to save the files.

Select “Thin” or “Thick” disk provisioning, then click Next.

Note: We recommend selecting "Thick" provisioned disks.

If the used VMware ESXi hypervisor has multiple connected interfaces with multiple networks, network mapping also needs to be selected.

When everything is ready hit the Finish button.

Please note that the upload based on your internet speed might take several minutes. During that time do not refresh your browser.

Launch the virtual machine

Navigate to the Virtual Machines tab in the left-hand column, right-click on the new machine you just imported, and select Edit settings.

Load the virtual CD image that you have uploaded to the datastore.

Set “Datastore ISO file” for CD/DVD drive 1 (1) and select the .iso image on your datastore.

Make sure that the “Connect At Power On” (2) is selected, then click Save.

Click on the new machine you just imported.

Power on the machine.

Change the default password on the virtual machine

Launch the Console of the virtual machine.

When requested, use default user and the default password to log in.

Change the password by following the required steps appearing on the screen.

Please note, that the machine is completely functional even without the password change, however, for security reasons it is highly recommended to change the password.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed and launched the virtual machine on VMware ESXi.

For this installation the VHD disk image and the virtual CD image are required.

Prepare for deployment on Microsoft Hyper-V

Copy the VHD disk image file to the destination server.

Open the Hyper-V Manager from the Server Manager.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831766(v=ws.11).aspx

Install the virtual machine on Microsoft Hyper-V

Create a new virtual machine

In the Hyper-V Manager, select New > Virtual Machine in the Actions pane.

The New Virtual Machine Wizard opens.

In the first step, type in a name for the virtual machine.

If you would like to store the virtual machine at a different location, select the appropriate folder.

In the next step, select “Generation 1”.

Assign minimum 4096 MB memory for the instance and enable the dynamic memory usage for the virtual machine.

For more on the dynamic memory please read the Microsoft Technet article:

Select the network switch for the virtual machine.

Select “Use an existing virtual hard disk”, and click Browse to select the file. After the file is selected, click Next to proceed.

Verify the entered information and click Finish.

Launch the virtual machine

After the import has finished, select the imported virtual machine, right-click and select Settings in the contextual menu.

Select the virtual CD image for the DVD Drive of the virtual machine, then click OK.

Right click on the virtual machine and select Start.

The state of the machine changes to “Running”.

Now, select the newly deployed virtual machine, right-click and select Settings in the contextual menu.

Select Integration Services (1) in the left panel of the Settings dialog, and disable “Time synchronization” (2).

Change the default password on the virtual machine

Launch the Console of the virtual machine.

When requested, use default user and the default password to log in.

Change the password by following the required steps appearing on the screen.

Please note, that the machine is completely functional even without the password change, however, for security reasons it is highly recommended to change the password.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed and launched the virtual machine on Microsoft Hyper-V.

See below the list of all the midgress regions and their designated fallback regions.

Midgress region name

Fallback region

Midgress server names

Asia Pacific - Sydney

syd01

hkg02

sjc

syd01.midgress.deepcaching.net

syd01.midgress.deepcaching.net

Asia Pacific - Tokyo

tok02

hkg02

sjc

tok02.midgress.deepcaching.net

tok02.midgress.deepcaching.net

Asia Pacific - Seoul

seo01

tok02

sjc

seo01.midgress.deepcaching.net

seo01.midgress.deepcaching.net

Asia Pacific - Hong Kong

hkg02

tok02

sjc

hkg02.midgress.deepcaching.net

hkg02.midgress.deepcaching.net

Asia Pacific - Singapore

sng01

hkg02

sjc

sng01.midgress.deepcaching.net

sng01.midgress.deepcaching.net

India - Chennai

che01

sng01

sjc

che01.midgress.deepcaching.net

che01.midgress.deepcaching.net

EU - Frankfurt

fra02

lon02

sjc

fra02.midgress.deepcaching.net

fra02.midgress.deepcaching.net

EU - London

lon02

fra02

sjc

lon02.midgress.deepcaching.net

lon02.midgress.deepcaching.net

South America - Sao Paolo

sao01

dal09

sjc

sao01.midgress.deepcaching.net

sao01.midgress.deepcaching.net

US East - Washington DC

wdc04

dal09

sjc

wdc04.midgress.deepcaching.net

wdc04.midgress.deepcaching.net

US Central - Dallas, TX

dal09

wdc04

sjc

dal09.midgress.deepcaching.net

dal09.midgress.deepcaching.net

Central America - Mexico City

mex01

dal09

sjc

mex01.midgress.deepcaching.net

mex01.midgress.deepcaching.net

US West - San Jose, CA

None. This is the origin

IBM Watson Media ECDN provides a solution to relieve network bottlenecks associated with delivering video content to locations, such as corporate offices, where you have a high number of concurrent viewers watching the same video content, such as a live broadcast or previously recorded videos. ECDN servers cache a single copy of a video asset, which is then delivered across the local network to viewers. Till now the content was only cached to memory, and was lost on every reboot. Now, you can store the cache content to a persistent data store in the virtual appliance for ECDN.

For live broadcasts, storing video content in the memory of the ECDN server has been a sufficient solution. Video assets had to be stored only for a short-time, to support real-time viewing of the video content.

Caching recorded videos requires long-term storage of the video assets on the ECDN servers. From now on, you can attach a secondary disk to each ECDN server, where recorded videos will be stored encrypted for up to 1 year.

Long-term storage also means that the content stored on the cache disk is preserved across reboots of the ECDN server and even during software upgrades.

Video content will be stored for up to 1 year to the extent of the disk capacity. When the cache disk is full, the oldest videos (age is defined by when it was last accessed) will be deleted.

How to attach cache disk

Follow these steps to attach a cache disk to an ECDN server instance:

Create a new virtual disk in your hypervisor. Minimum 4 GB disk is required for caching recorded videos.

Attach this new virtual disk to the virtual appliance of youre ECDN server.

Reboot the ECDN server.

The new disk will be detected and formatted automatically, and the server instance will start to use it. You can check this on the ECDN Management Portal. It will appear as “Cache disk” on the detailed view of your ECDN server.

IBM Watson Media has deployed a set of “midgress” servers in select IBM managed data centers around the world, to efficiently cache and distribute enterprise video content. ECDN server instances use these midgress servers as their upstream source for downloading video content.

This midgress deployment is designed to provide geographical reach, scale, high availability and meet enterprise level security requirements. Each midgress region has multiple servers to provide scale and redundancy within a data center. Further each region has a pre-determined designated backup region assigned to ensure resiliency against data center failures.

ECDN customers now only need to whitelist a very narrow range of IBM owned IP addresses in their enterprise firewalls to allow the ECDN servers to get the video contents. In contrast prior to midgress, customers had to open firewall to a large range of IP addresses owned by non-IBM CDN providers. This list of IP addresses would often change, requiring updates to the enterprise firewall settings. Now with midgress, all that firewall whitelist configuration and maintenance is no longer needed. Further, the midgress server IP addresses fall within the same range of IP addresses required by the companion IBM Watson Media Enterprise forVideo Streaming service.

In the ECDN Management Portal, for each location definition, you must now specify a midgress region. All ECDN server instances configured in that location will inherit this property and use the designated region as the upstream source for video content. Pick the midgress region that is closest to the Internet egress for that location to ensure the lowest latency in getting the content.

As part of the feature rollout, ECDN operations team configured each existing ECDN location with the closest midgress region. If you are experiencing any performance issues with respect to video playback, then please do review the midgress setting in the ECDN Management Portal, and ensure it is set to the closest region.

View the list of all the midgress regions and their designated fallback regions.

Manually control ECDN server selection

IBM Watson Media player during playback, by default, connects to the nearest available ECDN servers which are dynamically determined. In this article we describe how you can precisely control which ECDN servers the player can connect to.

IBM Watson Media player during playback, by default, connects to the nearest available ECDN servers. Player sends a HTTPS ping request to all the registered ECDN servers for that location to determine the nearest server. The server that responds the quickest is designated the nearest one, and player connects to it to download the video stream. This dynamic selection works for most deployments, and is repeated periodically to ensure a smooth viewing experience.

Optionally, you can also precisely control what ECDN servers players connect to. On a per-location basis you may specify a blacklist or whitelist of local IP address subnets. When enabled, ECDN servers will only respond to playback requests as per this list.

While this capability gives you the most control, you also have to regularly update the configured local IP address list, as and when local subnets change in your network.

Enabling manual ECDN server selection

These settings are enabled on a per-location basis. In the ECDN web portal navigate to the locations detail page. Click "CHANGE CONFIGURATION" to edit the location definition.

Enable the checkbox to all players to connect to ECDN servers at this location. This setting needs to be enabled before you can enter the list of local IP address ranges.

This will enable the "Client connection restrictions" dropdown widget. It will display the default value of "No restrictions".

Choices are:

No restrictions

This is the default value. When picked there are no restrictions enforced on which players can connect to ECDN servers in this location.

Blacklist: Prevent IP addresses in this list

This option will let you enter a list of local IP address ranges that are NOT allowed to connect to any ECDN servers in this location.

Whitelist: Allow IP addresses in this list

This option will let you enter a list of local IP address ranges that are allowed to connect to any ECDN servers in this location. ECDN server will reject connections from all other IP address ranges not in the list.

Pick Blacklist or Whitelist from the dropdown menu as needed. This will then show you a text box where you can enter the list of local IP addresses.

In this example, only players with IP addresses in these local ranges will be able to ECDN servers in this location.

Click "Save". The changes will take about 60 seconds to go into effect .

Adding or removing local IP address ranges

Follow the same process to make changes. In the text box add or remove address ranges and click "Save".

Frequently asked questions

What is an example use case for enable manual server selection?

Consider the following scenario.

A company has offices in four locations in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Foster City. Each location has two ECDN servers installed.

They have their data center in the San Jose location. Only the data center has direct network egress to the Internet.

The remaining three locations have private MPLS circuits connecting them to the data center. All network traffic to the Internet first flows over the MPLS circuit to the San Jose data center, and then out to the destination in the Internet.

ECDN deployment architecture has:

San Jose as the parent ECDN location. As this is the only location with direct egress to the Internet, the location definition in the ECDN portal includes the public external IP addresses.

San Francisco, Oakland, and Foster City as the child ECDN location.

Each location has 2 ECDN servers each, for a total of 8 ECDN servers.

Any video playback request from any of the four locations will be redirected towards any of the 8 ECDN servers, as all of them have the same external IP.

Lets say a person in Oakland initiates a video playback. It will be given the list of 8 ECDN servers available. The player will initiate the HTTPS ping process to determine the nearest ECDN server.

In most cases the local ECDN server in Oakland will respond first, and the players will connect to the server in Oakland to download the video stream data. The server will download the stream data from the ECDN server in the parent location in San Jose, which in turn will download from the external IBM Watson Media midgress server in San Jose. This is the normal path, and flow of data is optimal and as-designed.

It is possible that under some exceptional network and server load connections the first ECDN server to respond to the HTTPS ping is the server in parent San Jose location. In this case all viewers in Oakland will now connect to ECDN servers in San Jose over the MPLS circuit. This is not optimal, as the network connection between Oakland and San Jose does not have the capacity to support so many concurrent download streams, and still support the business critical network traffic.

To handle such situations, you may want to consider enabling this manual server selection capability. Each location, will have a whitelist of local IP address ranges configured. This will prevent remote ECDN servers in San Francisco, San Jose and Foster City to respond to the HTTPS ping requests from players in Oakland. The net effect will be that video playback requests from Oakland will only be served by ECDN servers in Oakland.

Similarly, you can restrict the video playback requests for the other sites. As mentioned before, there is additional management overhead on behalf of the person responsible for maintaining the whitelist of IP addresses in the ECDN web portal. They will have to track the changes made by their local networking team, and then manually update the list in the ECDN web portal.

This article is for customers who want to optionally self-manage the ECDN DNS domain and SSL certificates.

For secure delivery of video streams, all communications to the ECDN servers happens over HTTPS. HTTPS requires ECDN servers to have a unique fully qualified domain names (FQDNs)and a SSL certificate for the domain name also must be installed in the servers. DNS server entries are created so that ECDN server's FQDNs resolve to local IP address in your internal network. When player uses URLs containing the FQDNs of the ECDN servers, these DNS settings are used to resolve them to the specific ECDN server instance for secure content downloads.

For managing the ECDN server DNS domain, there are two options:

1) IBM Watson Media Video managed

This options requires no further action from you as all aspects are managed by IBM.

Your ECDN account will be assigned a unique domain name <yourCompanyName>.deepcaching.net.

We will order the SSL wildcard certificate from a registered SSL Certificate Authority, for the domain *.yourCompanyName.deepcaching.net.

We will store the SSL certificate private key in your ECDN account, so that when new ECDN server instances are created, the SSL certificate private keys are also copied to the server.

We will create entries in the DNS servers for each ECDN server instance you define in the ECDN portal.

We will manage the SSL certificates in terms of tracking the expiry, renewals and updates on the servers.

We will also manage the DNS server entries in terms of keeping them in sync with any name changes you make in the ECDN portal.

2) Self-managed by customers

See below for details on what actions you need to take.

This option is for those customers who need to meet their corporate standards on how servers are named on their internal network, and are unable to share the SSL certificate private keys with IBM.

We will configure your ECDN account with your company's DNS domain name, and ECDN servers will be named *.yourCompanyDomainName.

You will be responsible for buying the SSL certificate for this DNS domain, tracking its expiry and renewals.

You will need to manually copy the SSL certificate private files in a designated location on the ECDN server instance (see details below).

You will create DNS entries in your local DNS server to resolve the FQDNs of the ECDN server instances to their local IP address.

Video delivery via ECDN servers will be disrupted when any of the following happens:

SSL certificates are not issued by a trusted SSL Certificate Authority.

There is a mismatch in the SSL certificate domain name and domain name registered in your ECDN account.

SSL certificate has expired.

SSL certificate private key files are not in the specified format.

SSL certificate is not installed in the designated location.

DNS server entries are not updated to match the names assigned to each ECDN server instance in the ECDN portal.

Any of these SSL certificate issues will usually result in viewers seeing a warning message in their browsers JavaScript console during playback, and/or a black screen, or notice that playback won't start.

Actions needed for self-managed ECDN DNS domains

Overview of installation steps

Define and create ECDN server instance - follow steps here.

After ECDN VMs are installed, remember to log into each of them and change the default password to what you generally use in production, as per your corporate standards.

Copy the SSL certs to these ECDN servers, and restart Nginx.

Run https://<ecdn-server-fqdn>/ping" to validate the SSL certs are working properly. If you get "PONG" response - all is good.

Access to SSL certificate for ECDN servers

Contact your local IT support team and request them to generate the SSL certificate for your ECDN servers. Most companies centralize SSL certificate management to a team with elevated privileges. This request may take several days to complete, and usually involves:

Purchasing a SSL certificate from a registered SSL Certificate Authority (CA). Most offer a 1-year or 2-year SSL certificate. Follow your company's guidelines. 2-year wildcard SSL certificates for your ECDN DNS domain usually makes management easier.

Generating a SSL certificate signing request (CSR). This step will generate a public and private key. The private key must be kept securely.

Getting your SSL certificate signed by the CA. Against the certificate purchase order, you will upload the certificate CSR file to the CA website. CA will validate your domain ownership details, and then alert you when your signed certificate is ready for download.

When ready, you should request the signed certificate to be given to you in PEM format ( http://how2ssl.com/articles/working_with_pem_files/ ). You will also need the certificate private key file.

Preparing SSL certificate files before copying to ECDN servers

You will need the signed certificate in two separate files (text files):

Certificate private key file - (*.key)

Signed certificate file - (*.crt)

You will get the certificate private key file from your IT team. This was generated when the certificate signing request was first created. Example: cert-private.key.

The signed certificate file (*.crt) is what you get from the CA site after they have completed the signing process. This .crt file should contain both your domain signed certificate and the signatures of all the intermediate certificate authorities.

If you did not get a combined .crt file, you can combine them yourself, by just concatenating them in a text editor. The order is important: the server certificate must come first, followed by the intermediate CA certificate, and then root CA certificate. Note the root CA certificates are optional if the root certificate comes from a known CA. On a linux system you can run:

cat myDomain.crt intermediateCA.crt > cert-combined.crt

At the end of this preparation step, you should have two text files:

cert-private.key

cert-combined.crt

You are now ready to copy these files to the ECDN servers.

Copy certificate files to ECDN server instances

Upload the two files to ECDN server to the home directory of ecdn account.

scp -p cert-private.key cert-combined.crt ecdn@ecdnserverfqdn:

SSH to the ECDN server.

ssh ecdn@ecdnserverfqdn

Verify that symlinks for the following files are present:

ls -l /etc/ssl/ecdn-box.*

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 34 Jan 4 18:13 /etc/ssl/ecdn-box.crt -> /var/lib/ecdn-box/ssl/ecdn-box.crt

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 34 Jan 4 18:13 /etc/ssl/ecdn-box.key -> /var/lib/ecdn-box/ssl/ecdn-box.key

Delete the symlinks, and confirm they were deleted:

sudo rm /etc/ssl/ecdn-box.*

ls -l

/etc/ssl/ecdn-box.*

ls: cannot access '/etc/ssl/ecdn-box.*': No such file or directory

Copy the new certificate files. Verify.

sudo mv ~ecdn/cert-combined.crt /etc/ssl/ecdn-box.crt

sudo

mv ~ecdn/cert-private.key /etc/ssl/ecdn-box.key

ls -l

/etc/ssl/ecdn-box.*

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4030 Jan 10 11:51 /etc/ssl/ecdn-box.crt

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3242 Jan 10 11:51 /etc/ssl/ecdn-box.key

Restart nginx service to load the certificates:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Run the following command to verify that the ECDN server is encrypting the traffic.

curl -v https://$(hostname)/ping

Following line in the output will indicate everything is okay:

server certificate verification OK

Response should be:

PONG

Validate using a browser on your workstation. In your browser invoke: https://yourECDNserverFQDN/ping

You should see a "green" padlock icon in the URL address bar. This indicates the browser received a valid SSL certificate from the ECDN server. This completes the setup process for this ECDN server instance.

Repeat these steps to copy the certificate files to all the remaining ECDN server instances.

Manage access control with user roles

ECDN portal defines three roles:

Reader - Users with this role have read-only privileges within the ECDN portal. They are not allowed to make any changes to ECDN location or ECDN server configurations.

This role is most suitable for team members who need to monitor ECDN servers during a live broadcast or get historical ECDN usage reports.

Admin - Users in this role inherit all the privileges of the Reader role. In addition, they have the ability to changes ECDN location and ECDN server configurations. They can also add or delete any SSH keys registered in the ECDN account, which control access to the ECDN server instances. However, users in this role are not allowed to manage ECDN portal logins.

This role is suitable for most team members who are responsible for the video delivery infrastructure which includes the ECDN servers.

SuperAdmin - Users in this role inherit all the privileges of the Admin role. In addition, they have the ability to view and manage all the user logins to the ECDN portal. They can add new logins or suspend/restore existing logins. They can also change the role assigned to each user login.

This role should be assigned to select designated "privileged" team members within the team responsible for maintaining the video delivery infrastructure which includes the ECDN servers.

Notes:

Even SuperAdmins are not allowed to completely delete an user login via the ECDN portal. If you need to permanently revoke access of any team member, please open an ECDN support ticket. As part of the cleanup, ECDN operations team will ensure all mentions of that user login is appropriately deleted or anonymized to remain compliant with privacy regulations.

An ECDN portal login with Admin role can add or delete any SSH key registered in the ECDN account, as SSH keys are not tied directly to an ECDN login.

With SSH keys capability, you can now give access to other team members without giving them access to the ECDN portal.

This need is most commonly seen when members of your IT security team want to run a security scan on the ECDN servers, but do NOT need access to the ECDN portal. As and Admin you can simply add their SSH key in the ECDN portal and grant them remote SSH access. When they are done with their scans, you may revoke their access by deleting that temporary key.

As a SuperAdmin, on the user details page, you can see a historical log of all the successful logins. Each entry includes date and time (in UTC) and public IP address from where the request was received.

You can add existing SSH keys or you can generate a new SSH key to use for authentication for ECDN.

Generating a new SSH key

1. Open Terminal for Mac or Command Prompt for Windows

2. Enter the following example command that will start the generation process

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

This starts creating a new SSH key and returns the following

> Generating public/private rsa key pair.

3. The ssh - keygen utility prompts you to indicate where to store the key. By pressing Enter you will save it to the default location.

> Enter a file in which to save the key (/Users/ you /.ssh/id_rsa): [Press enter]

4. Type a secure passphrase

> Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): [Type a passphrase]

> Enter same passphrase again: [Type passphrase again]

With this you have finished generating the SSH key. After successful completion the following message is returned :

Your identification has been saved in /Users/ you /.ssh/id_rsa.

Your public key has been saved in /Users/ you /.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

The key fingerprint is:

KEY FINGERPRINT

Note : Never share your private key with anyone!

Adding your SSH key to ECDN

Your public key is saved to the /Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file by default. This is the key that you can add to your ECDN account.

1. Log in to the ECDN Management Portal https://ecdn.deepcaching.com/.

2. Navigate to the Manage SSH keys section that can be accessed from the user menu by moving your mouse over the account email at the top right corner.

3. Click on Add new SSH key

4. Fill in the Title and public Key and press Add to add new SSH key to ECDN. Depending on your operating system you can find the public key in the .ssh folder under your home directory.

To save the public key on Mac to the clipboard, run this in Terminal:

pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

To save the public key on Windows to the clipboard, run this after opening the Command Prompt :

type \%HOMEDRIVE\%\%HOMEPATH\%\.ssh\id_rsa.pub | clip

Now you are able to use SSH to access ECDN servers.

IBM releases regular updates for ECDN. For all of our users it is essential to keep all servers on the latest production versions. Besides continuously releasing new features, IBM provides regular fixes including security patches. Therefore, regular ECDN updates contribute to the overall security of your IT environment.

There are two ways to upgrade ECDN servers. The preferred option is to use the built-in Maintenance Window function under Software updates for ECDN servers. This is an easy-to-use tool to automate all upgrades.

Methods to upgrade ECDN servers are:

Automated upgrades by specifying a Maintenance Window - recommended

Manual upgrade via reinstall

Please, note that if you decide to use Manual upgrade via reinstall option on an ECDN server instance that had an attached Cache Disk then, you will lose all cached VOD content on this disk.

1. Automated upgrades by specifying a Maintenance Window

This is the recommended way to keep your ECDN servers updated. All your existing configuration settings including the secondary VOD cache disk contents will be preserved.

Settings for Maintenance Window can be reached in the ECDN portal via the Servers -> Software updates menu item.

https://support.video.ibm.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005182769-Getting-started-with-ECDN

Alternatively, whenever a new release is published, the portal also displays an alert banner with the link to the Software updates page.

On this page you will be able to set up your maintenance window under Your maintenance window section. In the Available software updates section, you can also find version numbers of all existing servers and other relevant details.

To set the maintenance window, you need to enter:

Occurrence This can be Daily, Weekly or Not set. For the weekly option, you will need to additionally specify the day of the week. To disable automated upgrades, select Not set.

Start time Time of day when the upgrade will start. The upgrade will complete within an hour of the start time.

Timezone Timezone for the start time.

Notes:

This maintenance window time setting is an account-wide setting. All ECDN server instances in your account, regardless of location, will be upgraded at the specified time.

Only ECDN servers running version 2.3.1 or later can be updated via this method.

2. Manual upgrade via reinstall

You can also update ECDN servers by deleting the older VM and reinstalling by using the latest virtual appliance image. You do not have to delete the server definition in the ECDN cloud. The latest virtual appliance image can be downloaded from the SUPPORT & DOWNLOADS page in ECDN portal ( https://ecdn.deepcaching.com/support.html ).

Note with the reinstall, if enabled, you will lose the VOD cache disk contents. For this reinstall, you will need to download the virtual cd configuration file from the ECDN portal.

The reinstall steps are:

Download the Virtual appliance image for your hypervisor from the SUPPORT & DOWNLOADS page in the portal.

Download the virtual CD configuration file for each server.

Go to Server page

Click on Change Configuration

Press Next until you reach Configure server

Select Download virtual CD configuration file for your hypervisor.

Then press Generate button to download the file.

In your hypervisor console, shut down the ECDN server VM instance and delete it.

Create new ECDN server VM instance using the hypervisor image and virtual CD configuration file. For more information on this see the Getting started with ECDN () support article.

Note, you may also start afresh for these manual upgrades. You can delete the ECDN server definition in the ECDN portal, and create a new entry. You will need to re-specify any custom parameters such as local DNS servers and NTP server again. In this case, you don’t need to download the old virtual CD configuration file, because a it will be generated again for the new definition.