Ant Media Server

Ant Media Server is streaming infrastructure rather than a streaming service: it takes RTMP or WebRTC in, transcodes, and delivers with latency measured in fractions of a second. Licences are sold by the instance, by the hour for something that runs occasionally and by the month for something always on. SDKs are included rather than sold separately. This is a product for whoever is building the streaming app, not for whoever is going live tonight.

Two ways to buy. Through a cloud marketplace it is hourly, from $0.33 on AWS, $0.44 on Azure and $0.56 on Google, with a seven-day trial stated on the first. Self-hosted, an hourly licence is $0.24 per instance per hour of uptime with a $1 signup fee, and a monthly licence is $109 per instance; an annual one sits below both. Every licence carries transcoding, the SDKs, standard support and free software upgrades.

A developer building streaming into a product, particularly one where latency is the requirement: auctions, betting, live shopping, two-way video. The hourly licence makes intermittent events cheap. A creator who wants to go live on their own channel wants broadcasting software and a platform, not a media server, and every part of this will be overhead for them.