Swift & Wowza Deliver Seamless Streaming to Remote Locations
▼ Summary
– Swift and Wowza have partnered to deliver high-quality streaming to bandwidth-constrained and infrastructure-limited locations worldwide.
– The solution uses Wowza Streaming Engine to create a resilient, edge-powered architecture for live and on-demand video with under 1 Mbps bandwidth.
– Key innovations include over 150 localized Wowza deployments, predictive caching, hybrid streaming, and user-friendly set-top boxes for remote sites.
– The platform serves critical purposes beyond entertainment, such as mental health resources in remote areas and enhanced connectivity in aged care facilities.
– This partnership has achieved significant real-world results, including over 25,000 daily users, 99.99% uptime, and improved engagement in isolated communities.
Swift Networks, a specialist in remote content delivery, has teamed up with video infrastructure leader Wowza to bring high-quality streaming to the world’s most isolated and bandwidth-limited locations. This partnership enables robust live and on-demand video services in areas previously considered unreachable by conventional streaming platforms.
From remote Australian mining camps and offshore oil rigs to aged care facilities and defense installations, Swift now delivers content to places with extremely limited infrastructure. By embedding Wowza Streaming Engine at the core of its system, Swift has built a resilient, edge-powered architecture that functions reliably even with less than 1 Mbps of bandwidth and no local IT support. Aidan Sommerville, Swift Networks COO, emphasized, “If a site has power, we can get them content.”
Operating in harsh and sensitive environments, Swift required a platform capable of delivering critical video with minimal latency, zero downtime, and no dependency on the public internet. Traditional streaming solutions were unable to meet these demanding conditions.
To overcome these challenges, Swift deployed more than 150 localized Wowza Streaming Engine instances directly on-site, establishing a distributed, edge-based content delivery network across Australia and other regions. This setup supports predictive content caching, adaptive bitrate streaming, and integration with DVB-T networks, ensuring thousands of concurrent users can access content without interruption, even during peak usage.
Key innovations include Edge CDN with over 150 Wowza deployments positioned at the network edge. Beyond entertainment, Swift’s platform serves critical community needs. In collaboration with Beyond Blue, it provides integrated mental health resources directly to remote users, supporting wellbeing in high-stress environments. For aged care residents, the system offers chapel services, live family broadcasts, and user-friendly interfaces that help reduce isolation and agitation.
The results speak for themselves as more than 25,000 daily users across Australia. Working with major operators like Chevron and Shell, Swift has tailored its platform for offshore applications, optimizing performance over satellite links and building in extreme redundancy. Pre-deployment testing in simulated vessel environments ensures reliable performance even in the toughest maritime conditions.
While much of the industry concentrates on high-speed urban markets, Swift and Wowza are dedicated to content inclusion, reaching communities often ignored by mainstream providers.
Alex Gammelgard, Wowza’s VP of Marketing, noted, “We’re not just streaming content. We’re delivering connection, mental health resources, and community to places the internet forgot.”
(Source: Streaming Media)