There is no doubt video, in all its forms, is one of the standouts in the development of information and communications technologies (ICT). Whether it is streaming a TV show, delivering webinars, video conferencing, video chats or watching the latest antics of people on YouTube, the popularity is undeniable and companies have a vested interest in making it more accessible. EvoStream is doing so with the release of its new EvoStream Media Server, which will provide two very important new features for the video-centric world we live in: Sub-Second HTML5 Playback and H.264 Peer to Peer video.

The EvoStream Media Server (EMS) is designed to receive many video and/or audio streams with different formats and deliver them in any supported format at the same time. While the end result might sound simple, the EMS has been developed with a network layer specifically programmed to work with every operating system it runs on. This means no compatibility issues for the end user.

The platform also makes the best use of CPUs, network cards or RAM (News – Alert)/memory. According to the company, a real-life production system running on an I5 processor can deliver up to 30,000 connections before it saturates the CPU. For small SMBs that want to use video to increase their presence, this is an affordable entry into rich media marketing and communications.

The direct HTML5 streaming with sub-second latency allows users to play live streams no matter what the source is on any Media Source Extension (MSE) enabled browser. And since MSE is supported by Android (News – Alert), Chrome, Safari (OS X), Firefox and MS Edge, it further eliminates any compatibility issues with the most widely used platforms in the market place.

The EMS live streaming video is designed for low latency streaming, but it delivers and supports Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Smooth Streaming. This allows it to deliver simultaneous streaming of HTIML5 video in real-time along with HLS and DASH.

The Peer to Peer capability streams directly to Web browsers using standard H.264 payloads without having to transcode to VP8 and other video compression applications. Administrators can control any peering activity by deploying them on EvoStream or within client networks. By leveraging HTML5 delivery, this Peer to Peer feature doesn’t require any plugin or native application to playback videos.

One of the more useful features that is now part of the EMS is, metadata delivery. This is a valuable tool for organizations as they try to measure different metrics of the video that is being created or consumed. The EMS platform now allows the metadata to be transported with the video through the entire workflow, so everything from location to heart rate can be part of the data. The information is delivered in real-time, frame-aligned and in-time with the video.

It has been more than a year since Evostream made any revisions to the EvoStream Media Server, but it was worth the wait.