Scout for Wowza Streaming Engine

Scout is a commercial module for Wowza Streaming Engine that injects CMSD (CTA-5006 — Common Media Server Data) metadata into HTTP responses for HLS and DASH streams, with integrated Media Quality Assessment (MQA) and a rich telemetry pipeline.

When a client requests an HLS or DASH resource from an application that has Scout loaded, the module attaches standardised CMSD keys — bitrate, object type, streaming format, stream type, and quality scores — to the response in real time, with no re-encoding and no interruption to the stream.

Features

  • CMSD-Static header: ot (object type), sf (streaming format), st (stream type), br (bitrate) — injected on every HLS and DASH session.

  • CMSD-Dynamic header: vmaf, psnr, ssim quality scores (SVTA2128 MQA extension) — injected alongside CMSD-Static when quality data is available.

  • HLS and DASH support: Cupertino (HLS) and MPEG-DASH streaming sessions.

  • H.264 SEI ingest: Extract SVTA2128 MQA quality scores embedded by the live encoder directly in the H.264 bitstream (user_data_unregistered SEI).

  • MQA REST ingest: Accept quality scores pushed by an external encoder or quality-assessment tool (Standard license and higher).

  • Prometheus metrics export: Per-stream quality scores and counters with VMAF histogram (Standard license and higher).

  • Webhook JSON export: Periodic push of all active stream metrics to a configurable HTTP endpoint (Standard license and higher).

  • OpenTelemetry (OTLP) export: Metrics via gRPC or HTTP/protobuf to an OpenTelemetry Collector (Integration license and higher).

  • Kafka export: Per-stream metrics published to a Kafka topic (Integration license and higher).

  • Quality alerting: Webhook alerts when VMAF drops below a configurable threshold (Enterprise license).

License tiers

Scout is available in three tiers. See License for details.

Tier

Features included

Standard

CMSD-Static and CMSD-Dynamic header injection, H.264 SEI ingest, MQA REST ingest, Prometheus export, webhook JSON export.

Integration

All Standard features, plus OpenTelemetry (OTLP) export and Kafka export.

Enterprise

All Integration features, plus quality alerting.

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