PUBLISH CATEGORY BaM™Award Nominee – Wowza ClearCaster™
Wowza Media Systems™; is the recognized gold standard of streaming, with more than 22,000 customers in 170+ countries.
By reducing the complexities of video and audio delivery to any device, Wowza™; enables organizations to expand their reach and more deeply engage their audiences, in industries ranging from education to broadcasting. Service providers, direct customers and partners worldwide trust Wowza products to provide robust, customizable and scalable streaming solutions – with powerful APIs and SDKs to meet organizations’ evolving streaming needs. Wowza was founded in 2005, is privately held, and is headquartered in Colorado. For more information, please visit www.wowza.com.
About ClearCaster
Wowza ClearCaster™: an appliance built for professional broadcasters and streamers seeking an easy way to improve reliability for streaming on Facebook Live. Designed in collaboration with Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), the ClearCaster appliance is built from the ground up to ensure the most successful broadcasts and engaging conversations on Facebook Live, from any workflow.
Wowza ClearCaster™ appliance is aimed at meeting demands for today’s professional broadcasters. ClearCaster provides automated redundancy setup, ensuring unparalleled reliability on Facebook Live, as well as the ability to simulcast streams through the Wowza Streaming Cloud™ service.
ClearCaster’s built-in redundancy capabilities allow broadcasters to run multiple devices, and failover or toggle between two or more paired machines. Broadcasters can also remotely manage ClearCaster through Wowza ClearCaster Manager (available at http://clearcaster.wowza.com): a user interface where users can start and stop streams, adjust settings, configure redundancy and many other features.
To help broadcasters deliver to audiences beyond Facebook Live, ClearCaster can simulcast broadcast-quality streams through Wowza Streaming Cloud. Users simply pre-set a stream target in Wowza Streaming Cloud, then provide the connection code in ClearCaster Manager when setting up the stream to select their simulcast destination.
ClearCaster also offers several new native publishing features to increase audience reach and engagement. This includes the ability to restrict viewing audiences based on location, age or gender to aid with audience targeting and limit the viewership area for posts. Furthermore, ClearCaster supports embedded 608 captions, helping public broadcasters and news organizations satisfy FCC closed-captioning requirements for social audiences.
To increase the overall engagement of Facebook Live viewing on mobile devices, ClearCaster offers broadcast 1:1 aspect video options. Broadcasters simply select the Mobile Video Optimization checkbox in their ClearCaster settings, and the video is immediately cropped to fit, with the live preview of the cropped feed available on the Talent View display.
Wowza has further updated the pricing and core functionality of the ClearCaster appliance, introducing a new version: ClearCaster 1080. Priced at $2,995, ClearCaster 1080 delivers crisp HD-quality video to Facebook, and allows for redundancy and simulcasting to multiple destinations. ClearCaster 4K, priced at $6,495, will support UHD ingest and deliver in 4K to Facebook Live when supported; it also comes with a free one-year subscription to Wowza Streaming Cloud, as well as advanced comment moderation features.
The scalable solution runs on off-the-shelf hardware, making it easy to implement, and minimizes the overall cost of initial ownership. Everything the customer needs, including the OS, a bootable product image and license, is delivered in its entirety on a Flash drive.
