| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founder(s) | David Stubenvoll[1] Charlie Good |
| Headquarters | Evergreen, Colorado, U.S. |
| Products | Wowza Media Server |
| Website | www.wowza.com |
Wowza Media Systems, Inc. is a media server software company headquartered in Evergreen, Colorado, USA. The company was founded in 2005 by two former Adobe Systems employees, David Stubenvoll and Charlie Good, to focus on creating media server software optimized for streaming of live and on-demand video and audio, as well as Rich Internet applications (RIA) across a wide range of media player and device platforms encompassing computers, IPTV set-top boxes, video game consoles, mobile and other Internet connected devices.
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Formed initially under the WowzaTV, LLC name, the company founders worked on developing social video websites using Adobe Flash technology. To achieve abilities that were unavailable from Adobe Flash Communication Server and Flash Media Server products, the company founders created a Java server applet that implemented Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) to reliably record live video and audio directly to the server from user computers’ webcams using embedded encoding abilities of the Flash player browser plug-in. This server applet was used in limited deployment on company’s experimental video blogging and video messaging websites.
While experimenting with Internet video, company founders discovered a significant demand for a better alternative to existing media server platforms – such as Adobe Flash Media Server, Microsoft IIS/Windows Media Services, Apple QuickTime Server/Darwin Server, etc. In 2007, the company was renamed Wowza Media Systems, Inc., and re-launched as a media server software company.
In early 2006, Charlie Good, Wowza’s CTO and co-founder, defined a protocol, codec and player agnostic unified server architecture and embarked on creating the first iteration of Wowza Media Server software. After a beta testing period,[2] Wowza Media Server Pro 1.0 was released on February 19, 2007[3] as a less expensive but fully featured alternative to Adobe Flash Media Server.[4]
In May 2008, version 1.5 of Wowza Media Server Pro was introduced.[5] It expanded the abilities of the product with H.264 video and AAC audio streaming support and ingest from non-Flash (RTSP/RTP and MPEG-TS) H.264 live encoders and SHOUTcast/Icecast audio sources. This marked the company’s first step towards commercializing the vision of unified media server. The product was ably marketed, and due to its RTSP/RTP and MPEG-TS, and SHOUTcast/Icecast audio ingest abilities, became a popular choice with Internet radio and TV broadcasters and other users who wanted a broader choice of encoding platforms and lower server software prices.[6]
A major inflexion point came with the introduction in December 2009 of Wowza Media Server 2 product,[7] which replaced Wowza Media Server Pro software and took the server beyond Flash with the addition of Microsoft Smooth Streaming support aimed at Microsoft Silverlight clients and Windows Phone 7 devices; Apple QuickTime player and iOS platform (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch); 3GPP mobile devices (Android, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, etc), and IPTV set-top boxes and game consoles.
The Company now reports a customer base for its Wowza Media Server software of over 50,000 licensees in over 60 countries.
Wowza Media Systems is a closely held, profitable, self-funded corporation.