Our new monitoring system uses open-source software such as the popular VLC Media Player and FFMpeg media library. With huge supporting communities, these projects are constantly updated to play the latest streaming formats so we can monitor almost any stream you throw at us. We can also offer much more detail regarding the stream tests themselves and as a result, all Availability tests will be accessible individually so that you can see what the player was doing when a test was performed. And if you have special requirements for your stream, we can modify the monitoring system easily to accommodate.

Flash Payload monitoring is out of beta and into production! 24/7 confidence monitoring of your audio and video feeds is now possible, ONLY with Stream Alerts! Flash is still the most popular streaming format available and if you’re broadcasting live feeds, you need to know that viewers are seeing your content.

Some clients need to protect their streams with Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems and we are starting to address that need by authenticating before testing. Some of the DRM methods that are currently working include:

• Velocix Tokens - Input your stream ID, secret password and serial and we can grab the one-use only token from Velocix’s servers for your Flash or Windows Media stream
• Highwinds SMIL - For Highwinds customers, we can grab the one-time use URL form a Highwinds SMIL playlist before every test
• Icecast User Authentication - By formatting the URL for DRM protected Icecast streams, we can monitor with ease

If you have a different kind of DRM protection, please contact us and we’ll get to work on it for you.

Windows Media Encoder Session files (.wme files) use XML to store your session settings and can be edited using Notepad or any normal text editor. Save your session as a WME file and then open it for editing. Within the XML is an element called "Broadcast" . It should look something like this: 

<broadcast publishserver="mystream.com" publishingpoint="my_publishing_point" publishport="80"></broadcast>

 The PublishServer is the host you will be pushing to, PublishingPoint is the path to your live stream and the PublishPort is whatever TCP port you will connect to, usually 80. For authentication to work, you just have to add two lines as appear below:

<broadcast publishserver="mystream.com" publishingpoint="my_publishing_point" publishport="80" publishusername="my_username" publishpassword="my_pass">   </broadcast>

Thus PublishUsername will be the username and PublishPassword is the password for authentication. Save your changes and now if you try the command script, your stream should be able to authenticate and start pushing data.

For information on using the WM Command script to automatically start encoding sessions, visit my tutorial here.

• Multiple Monitoring Nodes per Stream – Each stream can now have multiple monitoring nodes monitoring from diverse geographical regions. A Content Delivery Network may be streaming your content to the East Coast of the United States without any problems but users in Europe may not be able to access the feed. Now you can monitor the same stream in both places and receive alerts when one or more nodes fail.
• Stream Name in Subject Line – If a single stream has failed, the name of that stream will appear in the subject line such as “— Stream Alert: My Stream Name —“. If many streams have failed, the subject line will say “— Stream Alert: Multiple Failures —”.
• Alert Details – The alerts now include failure details such as the error code and message returned by the monitoring node to help you diagnose the problem. Each alert will include all of the streams that are in failure mode at the time the alert was sent.
• Single Alert and Recovery Notice – Instead of constantly sending emails while a stream is in a failure state as we currently do, the new system will send an alert the first time a stream fails and will not, by default, send an alert until the stream has recovered. Along with this new feature, the system will send you a recovery notice when the stream is available again or the audio or video has returned under Payload monitoring. If you want to receive continuous alerts as per the old system, you can edit your contacts to use the previous method.
• SMS Contacts – For text messaging, you can configure a contact as an SMS receiver and the system will send an abbreviated alert containing just the names of streams in failure mode. Login to your account to gather details about failures.
• Automatic Tracerouting – a new feature that we offer is the ability for monitoring nodes to automatically run a traceroute to the stream upon a stream failure. The results will be stored under the Stream Failures log for each monitoring node but it can also be sent with alerts.
• URL Calling on Failure and Recovery – a much requested feature is the ability to trigger an external event when a stream fails, such as starting up a backup encoder or redirecting users to another feed. You can now configure your Stream Alerts account to call on a specific URL when a stream fails that will perform any task you program your server to perform. We can also call a separate URL on recovery. If you need help creating a script on your web server to perform an action, I would be happy to consult with you on how to write the proper code.
• Use your own SMTP Host – If you have trouble receiving alerts or you want to make alerts appear to come from your systems, we now have the option to send alerts through the SMTP host of your choice. You can setup an account wide host or a different host for each contact. Just supply the “From” email address, host name, account name and password to send alerts through your own system.
• Alert Log – Alerts now have their own detailed log where you can view every alert that was sent by our systems. It also logs any alerts that were NOT sent so if you are not receiving alerts for a failed stream, view the log to find out why.
• Alert Filters – Sometimes you don’t want to receive an alert when you know what the problem is ahead of time. New Alert Filters will block alerts from being sent and you can configure them for specific streams and contacts or for everything. This is particularly useful for times when the streaming server is full and you know that clients are being rolled over to another server.
• CSV Export – many new logs and reports can be downloaded in the popular CSV format so that you can store and manipulate Stream Alerts information on your own systems.
• Advanced Availability Settings – Advanced accounts can now finely tune the Availability monitoring of their streams including the number of retries before an alert is sent, the retry interval and the monitoring interval.