How To Setup Your Own Video Streaming Server In 5 Simple Steps?

We are living in the era of video streaming. With the growth of video streaming, the need for video streaming servers has increased exponentially.

However, due to the technical complexity involved in video streaming, choosing a video streaming server is always a big bet. And if you are planning to develop it from scratch on your own, it becomes even harder.

In this blog, we are going to guide you through the step-by-step process by which you can develop your own video streaming server from scratch. Also, we will discuss why many professional businesses are now choosing professional video servers or relying on a trusted streaming video host instead of self-made video streaming engines. But before that, let’s try to understand the technical nitty-gritty of a video streaming server.

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To start understanding a video streaming server, you will have to understand the video streaming process first. When you view any video content from the internet over your computer, smartphone, or smart TV, technically you are streaming a video. But what actually happens in this process?

The video creator first uploads the video into a platform, known as the video hosting platform. Many times, the video gets encoded during this process. Now, this video hosting software is connected to a server. This server is responsible for distributing the video content over a network, which in this case, is the internet.

This entire process in which the video gets encoded, stored in the cloud, distributed through the servers, and played by the players, is called video streaming.

Ideally, video streaming platform architecture can be of two types, which gives rise to two types of video streaming:

In on-demand streaming, the admins upload pre-recorded videos to the server. In simple terms, movies, video clips, or anything that is NOT LIVE, comes under on-demand streaming. Since the video is recorded and then uploaded, there is no need for any live video feed in its technical architecture.

As you see here, the raw video that is getting uploaded first gets compressed and encoded. The processed video file is then transferred into the streaming server, which is then distributed to the internet, from where it reaches the end users.

In live video streaming, the feed comes directly from the video source or a video input, which can be a camera. Hence, the live feed received from the video input (source) is first processed by a live-streaming encoder right on the spot, before delivering it to the server.

Also, there are many streaming protocols at play here, the most popular one being the HTTP Live Streaming protocol, known as the HLS protocol.

A video streaming server is responsible for distributing the video to the devices connected to the internet. It usually includes multiple elements, including the ABR measurement tool, optimization algorit