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If you're a streaming media hosting provider you may probably limit your clients to use some pre-defined amount of simultaneous connections or bandwidth. This case is also possible for a some other cases when you experience some network limitations.

What can we do?

WMSPanel allows controlling

• number of simultaneous connections;
• current bandwidth (transmission speed).

This is applicable for both Nimble Streamer and Wowza Streaming Engine. The limitations are set up in WMSPanel panel and are automatically applied to designated servers.

The following Wowza entities can be limited: entire server, virtual host, application, application instance, separate stream.
The following Nimble Streamer entities can be limited: server, host or IP, application and stream.

Set up control panel settings

To define restriction settings on server side, the agent must be notified about it. The set up is made via WMSAuth feature set.

WMSAuth group

In WMSAuth, every restriction may be applied to a group of servers. So the first thing to do is to create a group and assign one or more Wowza servers to it. Check this screenshot for details.

WMSAuth rule

Within a group, there may be several rules, each working with its set of Wowza entities. Just click on "Add rule" to enter rule creation page. Check this screenshot to see how you can specify Wowza vHost, application, instance or stream regular expression.

Set up limitations

Scroll to Connections restriction section and use two respective fields to specify parameters.

Connections count limit sets up a number of connections which are allowed at a single moment of time. E.g. if you allow 100 connections, and 100 players are connected your live stream, the 101st will be rejected to connect.

Bandwidth limit is the maximum transmission speed. E.g. you set it to 10Gbps and your connected players are using 10.2 Gbps (due to adaptive bit rate usage). In this case any new connection will be rejected.

Please notice that these limitations are applied to each server separately. So if you have 4 servers in your server farm and want to have a limit of 100 Gbps, you need to set up 25Gbps for each of the servers.

You can also see WMSAuth group description in this blog post.

Is that all?

Yes. Now the agent will be checking each incoming connection against existing limitation. This check takes a few milliseconds.

You may combine this functionality with hot-linking protection, restriction of geo-location and IP ranges as well as pay-per-view feature set.

How about view time limitations per user?

That is part of out pay-per-view framework which allows controlling connections on per-user level and receive precise view time.

What if WMSPanel is not accessible?

Limitation functionality will work regardless of WMSPanel availability. If your server can't connect to WMSPanel for some reason, this will still work fine. Once the rules are set up, the control panel is not used anymore.

Any other questions or problems?

Check the FAQ.

Please also check company forum to see common questions and answers from other companies.