ScaleEngine Service Descriptions and Monthly Price Chart
| LIVE STREAMING SERVICES | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FEATURE | BASE CHARGE | DESCRIPTION | DATA CHARGES | STORAGE CHARGES | ADDITIONAL STREAMS/CHANNELS |
| Live Streaming | $25.00 | 1 inbound RTMP stream. Immediate deployment, bring your own encoder. Instant player generator for all devices | $0.09 per GB | N/A | $5.00 each |
| Live Stream Recording | $125.00 | Simple upgrade to your live account. Record all, split on time intervals, or use our start/stop/split controls. Archived playback as VOD, with full FTP access. | $0.09 per GB Streamed to Viewers | $0.20 per GB | $5.00 each |
| Live Stream Transcoding | $50.00 | Simple upgrade to your live account. 1 inbound RTMP stream and transcoded output streams. JW Player smil manifest provided for all devices. | $0.09 per GB Streamed to Viewers | N/A | $50.00 |
| Google Analytics | $50.00 | Completely transparent to the viewer! No javascript. Instant real time location reporting on all streams including live streams and full device and player classification breakdown reports. All streams report to your GA account. | N/A | N/A | All streams included! |
| Live Stream Playlist | $50.00 | 1 live playlist stream, Control Panel List Builder with file browser. Our most flexible, powerful product. Stream live, 24/7, even when you are not live! | $0.09 per GB Streamed to Viewers | $0.20 per GB | $50.00 each |
| VOD STREAMING SERVICES | |||||
| VOD Streaming | $50.00 | Video File Browser with instant JW Player and Video.js generator for all devices. FTP, SFTP, RSYNC, SSH unix shell access. Smil generator tool for multi-bitrate VOD. | $0.09 per GB Streamed to Viewers | $0.20 per GB | N/A |
| SECURITY SERVICES API | |||||
| Geographic Stream Control | $25.00 | Geographic Stream Control system. Lock RTMP, RTSP and HLS streams to specific countries, and block all others. | |||
| SEVU | On Request | Token Authentication Based Stream Control system. Lock RTMP, RTSP and HLS streams to specific users and IP addresses, and block all others. | |||
| Many of our services can be combined. Transcoded streams can be recorded. Live and Channel streams can be transcoded or recorded. | |||||
We have tiered pricing available for larger users, available with a commitment of 10TB and up to 500TB monthly.
Please use this form to request specific bulk streaming rates.
Wowza Streaming Cloud Comparison with Scale Engine
Wowza streaming cloud is an Amazon product, and like all Amazon EC2 products, it is based on piling expensive usage fees for streaming hours, viewer data, and storage onto a low base price.
Wowza used to be called Wowza Media Server. It's a good extensible streaming server that we use as a listed partner. We add our own software to it so it does what we want for our customers. Because candidly, it doesn't do anything for its users without our systems. Then a couple of years ago they rolled out a "cloud" system (which are basically Amazon EC2 instances). Last year they actually renamed themselves Wowza Streaming Engine. We would note it's nice to be copied, but hard to be duplicated.
Despite their efforts to take our name, they are stuck with a difficult and intimidating interface. We've worked really hard to make our control panel work with our software so it is simple and easy to use.
But WSC has certainly borrowed a lot from the book seller people, Amazon, as far as their marketing goes. Anytime you see someone claim their product is "cheap" and "easy", be skeptical. Both Amazon and Wowza only show you one price, but have a LOT of extra charges in their account systems.
Storage:
Storage is not some hand-wavy "cloud" abstraction at ScaleEngine. We build our own storage arrays, and replicate the data carefully. We give our users direct access to their files, using common and robust internet protocols. We charge for the space, by counting what you use once a day, dividing that by 30, and adding all of the days in the month to get a total monthly usage figure.
With WSC, you get Amazon storage (they are reselling Amazon services for storage and for CDN), and billing for recording storage is based on the highest quantity stored in a given month. At any time. If you added 1 TB of data in any month, your bill goes up by 1TB. If you record constantly, your storage bill is the highest number for the month. Good luck deleting or retrieving anything too, because if WSC is anything like Amazon, it's a time-consuming and difficult process. With SE, we count exact daily usage every day, divide it by 30, and add up all days. A 1TB day is only 1/30th of your monthly bill with us. We have not even mentioned that we don't charge for inbound and outbound storage, either as FTP, or to prime our VOD caches.
Pricing:
ScaleEngine's famous $25 a month account, with $0.09 per GB data charges.
WSC $15/mo: 10GB data included. $49/mo: 100GB data included. $299/mo: 2TB included
If you don't actually do any streaming, WSC is okay. But if you stream 200GB of data, that's $19.00 plus the $15.00. Assuming you didn't stream longer than two hours. Oops. Because additional hours are $6.00 each. So take four Sundays, to stream two hours each day. Eight hours means $18.00 more per month. See how this adds up, for them? Do you want to not stream? Doesn't seem like a good thing.
ScaleEngine has no such time limits. We don't charge you to send us your stream at all, we just charge for viewer data. You can run 100 two hour events and it's still just viewer data and the $25.00 fee.
Consider recording. Our system has built in start stop and split commands, right in the control panel, and in our API. Our system calls back and tells you your file name. Our system does VOD (WSC does not do VOD at all, you need to run your own server, which won't scale, but we digress). Our system tells you the duration, codecs, and bitrate of your files, and lets you access your recordings directly, through both upload and download. We can also provide fast HTTPS and HTTP access if you want progressive VOD or want to enable downloading.
The other issue aside from expense is available scale. Our scale is famously global and reliable, and massively horizontal. That means we can handle the start of a big sporting event, or a news event traffic spike, without notice. Our scale works because we maintain a lot of capacity for our customers. You want scale with WSC? You have to reserve amazon space on the day of your event. Assuming you can predict traffic. That reservation is expensive. With ScaleEngine, again, it's your monthly account fee plus data. That's it. If you have a day with 2 TiB usage, you'll pay $180.00 usage, plus your $25.00. WSC has a 2 TiB plan that is $299 a month, but if you need that 2 TiB to go out in two hours, you'll have to pay for additional capacity from amazon if you want available scale for that much traffic. Seems counter-intuitive, but, that's amazon for you. WSC seems proud that you get to stream on a "CDN" (amazon). Why not use the real deal?
Video Streaming EstimatorDrag the sliders to get an instant usage estimate
| Live Video Streaming Estimator | |
|---|---|
| Streaming Delivery Cost | |